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4 







THE DICK AND LARRY SERIES 
BY FRANCIS LYNDE 

THE DONOVAN CHANCE 
DICK AND LARRY, FRESHMEN 
THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 









While they looked, one paused, appeared to dance for an instant, and 

then disappeared. [Page 32 













‘ THE DICK ANT) LARRY SERIES 

Vhe 

GOLDEN SPIDER 


BY 

FRANCIS LYNDEJ 

\\ 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 

1923 


2. 




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Copyright, 1923, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Printed in the United States of America 


Published September, 1923 


©CU752837 ^ 

-VXiO 



SEP 10'23 




TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND MINERALOGICAL 
MENTOR, CLARENCE M. CLARK, WITHOUT 
WHOSE KINDLY HELP, AND THE FREE USE 
OF HIS LIBRARY, SPECIMEN CABINETS AND 
LABORATORY, THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN 
SPIDER MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, 
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 




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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I In Lost Canyon . i 

II The Frozen Trail.17 

III In Which Dick Drops Out. 35 

\ 

IV Daddy Longbeard. 52 

V Footloose and Free.71 

VI Short Rations. 87 

VII Tomatoes and Peaches . 104 

VIII The Ice Cavern. 122 

IX The Spider’s Web.137 

X Notice to Quit.156 

XI Finders Keepers .173 

XII No Surrender. 192 
















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ILLUSTRATIONS 


While they looked, one paused—appeared to dance for an 

instant—and then disappeared. Frontispiece 

FACINO PAGE 

‘‘Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some 

kind?^’.- . . . 66 

“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know 

that they are barking up the wrong tree’^ . . . . ii6 


Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by 

tumbling backward upon his follower . . . . ^ . 200 










THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

CHAPTER I 

IN LOST CANYON 

T here wasn’t much suggestion of a canyon, lost 
or found, in the handsomely furnished office in the 
Brewster National Bank building where three young 
fellows in flannel shirts, belted corduroys and hob-nailed 
lace boots were waiting for the owner of the office to 
make his appearance. 

Of the three, only the middle-sized one, a good-looking 
chap whose rough outing clothes fitted him as if they 
were tailor-made, was showing signs of impatience. The 
biggest of the three, a square-shouldered young athlete 
with good gray eyes set wide apart, and a shock of dark- 
red, curly hair, was standing at a window which com¬ 
manded a magnificent view of the high, forested mountain 
range lifting the skyline to the westward, while the other 
member of the trio, an undersized fellow with a thin, 
eager face and pale blue eyes, was examining the mineral 
specimens in a corner cabinet. 

‘'Gee! I wish Uncle Billy would come!” said the impa- 

I 


2 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


tient one, jumping up to make a restless circuit of the 
room. ‘‘We don’t want to miss that train.” 

The big fellow turned from his window. “You’re 

sure he got in last night?” he said. 

“Oh, yes; they came in on the Flyer. Aunt Stella 
called mother over the ’phone after the train got in just 
to let us know. But I wish he’d come. We don’t want 
to lose another single day of this bully weather.” 

Dick Maxwell’s impatience was not altogether un¬ 
reasonable. Ten days earlier Mr. William Starbuck 
the “Uncle Billy” in question—had made a short stop in 
the Middle-Western college town where Dick and his two 
companions were just winding up their Freshman year, 
and had asked Dick how he was meaning to spend the 
long vacation. One thing had brought on another, and 
the upshot of the talk was an offer on the part of “Uncle 
Billy” to send Dick, and any two of his college-mates he 
might pick out, on a summer prospecting trip in the 
Hophra Mountains, the object in view being the possible 
discovery, not especially of silver or gold, but more par¬ 
ticularly of new sources of supply of the rare metals, 
tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, and the like, used in 
the arts and manufactures. 

Dick hadn’t wasted a moment in choosing the first of 
his companions for the summer outing. Larry Dono¬ 
van—the big fellow at the office window—son of a 
crippled locomotive engineer on the home railroad, had 
been his chum from their grade-school days in Brewster, 
and the two had spent the preceding summer together 
as “cubs” on the engineering staff of the railroad of 
which Dick’s father was the general manager, so Larry 
was promptly elected as Number Two in the prospecting 


IN LOST CANYON 


3 


trip. For the third member they had both picked upon 
Charles Purdick—Larry’s roommate in college—for sev¬ 
eral reasons: for one thing, *‘Little Purdy” was a pretty 
good plain cook; and for another, he needed the wages 
that Mr. William Starbuck was going to pay each mem¬ 
ber of the prospecting party irrespective of the success of 
the trip in the discovery of any new mineral deposits. 

But there was a third reason for Purdick’s invitation 
which was still stronger. “Purdy,” who, until he became 
the beneficiary of a certain mysterious scholarship in Old 
Sheddon, had been working his way through college, was 
the orphan son of a steel worker, and had grown up in a 
mill town, under-fed, neglected, kicked about and over¬ 
worked. He had never been West; had never known 
what it was to have a real vacation in the open; and both 
Dick and Larry had decided at once that he was to be 
Number Three, even if they should have to knock him 
down and handcuff him to bring him along. But Purdy 
hadn’t needed any handcuffing. 

Larry laughed good-naturedly at Dick’s miserly remark 
about the wasting of the “bully weather.” 

“Don’t you worry about the weather, old scout,” he 
said. “We’ll take that as it comes, and you know well 
enough that we’re likely to have a lot more good weather 
than bad, in the summer months.” 

“Oh, I guess yes,” was Dick’s rejoinder. “I’m just 
sweating to be off to the tall hills, that’s all.” Then to 
Purdick, who was busily writing in his notebook at the 
mineral cabinet: “What are you finding over there, 
Purdy ?” 

Purdick’s answer was forestalled by the entrance of 
Dick’s uncle by marriage, a bronzed, upstanding man 


4 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


who looked as if he might be a retired cattle king, and 
who really had been a range-rider in his younger days. 

‘Well, well! Here you are!” he said, shaking hands 
with the three. “Ready to go out and hit the high spots, 
are you? All right; sit down and we’ll round up the 
preliminaries—what few there are. Got your dunnage 
kits made up?” 

Dick answered for the three. 

“The packs are down at the station. Dad told us what 
we’d need—and what we wouldn’t need. I guess he hasn’t 
let us make any tenderfoot mistakes about loading up 
with a lot of the luxuries.” 

“That’s good. Now for my part of it. Tve wired 
ahead to Nophi, and Mr. Broadwick, the smelter superin¬ 
tendent, is the man you want to see. He’ll have a couple 
of burros for you, with your camping outfit and grub 
packed and ready on the arrival of your train. All you’ll 
have to do when you get there will be to hike out; take 
your foot in your hand and go.” 

“Right!” said Dick, bubbling over with excitement. 
And then: “In your letter from New York you said 
something about maps, Uncle Billy. Have you got them 
here?” 

The “grub-staking” uncle got up and took an envelope 
of folded maps from a pigeonhole in the office safe. 

“Here you are—sections of the Geodetic Survey cover¬ 
ing most of the territory where you are going. From 
Nophi you head up Lost Canyon to Mule-Ear Pass. After 
you cross the first range, the country is all yours. When, 
or if, you find any mineral, stake your claims and jot the 
locations down on the map. Are you carrying a copy of 
Dana’s ‘System’?” 


IN LOST CANYON 


5 


‘‘Got it in the dunnage,” Dick answered; “it, and a 
blow-pipe field-test outfit. We’ve all been boning the 
‘Dana’ for a week, and Mr. Ransom, out at the ‘Little 
Alice,’ has been showing us how to make tests.” 

“Good. The ‘Dana’ will help you in making the simple 
tests that can be made in the field, and, of course, when 
you find anything that looks right promising, you’ll bring 
samples of it back with you for a laboratory assay. 
That’s about all, I think. If you have a chance to send 
us word during the summer, do it; but if not, don’t worry, 
and we won’t. I’m betting confidently that you are all 
able to take care of yourselves, and of one another. How 
about arms?” 

Again it was Dick Maxwell who answered. 

“Dad has made each of us a present of a light Win¬ 
chester. They’re down at the station with the packs.” 

“You probably won’t need the artillery. It’s the closed 
season for game, but it won’t hurt to have the guns along. 
If you get tired of carrying them, you can put them in 
the jack packs.” 

Dick was nervously looking at his watch. It still 
wanted a full half-hour of train time, but we all know 
how that is when we are about to start out upon a won¬ 
derful voyage of discovery.’ 

“Well, Uncle Billy,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to be 
moving along.” So the handshaking was repeated, and 
they were heading for the door, when the grub-staking 
uncle called them back. 

“This is rather a humdrum job you’ve undertaken for 
the summer—looking for the industrial metals,” he said, 
with a twinkle in the shrewd gray eyes. “I’ve a mind to 
throw in a bit of romance, just for good measure. How 


6 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


would you like to keep an eye out for a lost gold mine—a 
real bonanza?” 

‘‘A lost gold mine?” Dick queried eagerly. ‘Who 
lost it?” 

The ex-cowboy uncle was smiling quizzically. “It is a 
pretty long story, and if you’ve got to hurry to your 
train-” he began; but Dick cut in quickly. 

“Tell us about it, Uncle Billy. We’ll catch the train 
all right,” 

“Think you can take time to listen? I’ll make it short. 
Three years ago, James Brock, an old prospector whom 
I knew well, was found at the mouth of Lost Canyon, 
dying of hunger and exposure. I had him brought down 
to Brewster and taken to the hospital. He lived only a 
few days, but during that time he told me his story. He 
said he had discovered a fabulously rich gold lode in the 
Little Hophras, and, staying to work it, the winter had 
caught him. He had been snow-bound for weeks with 
little or nothing to eat, but had finally made his way out 
over Mule-Ear Pass, half starved and with his feet and 
hands frozen.” 

“Poor old duffer!” said Dick sympathetically. “But 
go on. Uncle Billy. What became of the mine?” 

“Nobody knows. Brock had no maps, and he couldn’t 
describe the locality well enough to enable any one to 
find it- I don’t know how plentiful the ore is, but it is 
wonderfully rich, as you can see for yourselves,” and 
from a drawer in his desk he took a small piece of disin¬ 
tegrated quartz, shot through and held together by a 
wire-like mass of the precious metal. 

As one person, the three boys crowded around the desk 
to examine the'beautiful specimen, and none of them 



IN LOST CANYON 


7 


heard the office door open or knew that there was an 
intruder present until Mr. Starbuck suddenly covered the 
bit of quartz with his hand and said: ''Well, my man— 
what can I do for you?” 

As one person again, they all three wheeled and saw 
the man who had come in so quietly that none of them had 
heard him. Tramp or beggar, or whatever he was, he 
seemed to be an object of pity, dirty, unshaven, and a 
cripple, walking with a crutch and with one leg drawn up 
in a curiously twisted deformity. And he had a face—as 
Dick afterward phrased it—that would scare the rats out 
of a corn bin. 

"I’m lookin’ f’r Mister Bradley, th’ employmint man,” 
was the way the intruder accounted for himself. 

Mr. Starbuck shook his head. "Mr. Bradley’s office 
is on the floor below,” he replied; and at that, the man 
hobbled out, leaving the door open when he passed into 
the corridor. 

Dick Maxwell was again consulting his watch. "We 
have a few minutes more, Uncle Billy,” he said hurriedly. 
"Is that all you can tell us about the lost mine?” 

"Not quite all. James Brock told me how he came to 
discover the vein. He had camped one evening at the 
foot of a small cliff with a crevice in it. The cliff faced 
the east, and in the morning he saw that the crevice was 
curtained with a great wheel of a spider-web, and in the 
center of the web was an immense spider with a body 
that looked, with the sun shining on it, as if it were made 
out of pure gold. Brock took it as an omen. He dug in 
the crevice and found his mine, which he called 'The 
Golden Spider.’ So there is your bit of romance. Find 


8 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

the Golden Spider and maybe you will all come back 
rich/’ 

‘‘But if we should find it, it wouldn’t be ours,” put in 
little Purdick, speaking for the first time. 

“I’ll make my right and title over to the three of you,” 
said the grub-staking uncle, with the quizzical smile again 
wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. “When old Jimmie 
Brock found he wasn’t going to live, he made me this 
little pencil sketch of the place”—taking a folded paper 
from the drawer which had held the specimen—“and told 
me to go and take his bonanza for my own—made me 
his heir, in fact.” 

“And you never found it?” Dick asked. 

The quizzical smile turned itself into a quiet laugh. 

“No. I spent a good month of the following summer 
looking for it; and after the story got out, others looked 
for it, too. It has never been found, and probably never 
will be unless some prospector just happens to stumble 
upon it accidentally. One mountain is very much like 
another in the Little Hophras, and Brock couldn’t name 
his mountain, or describe it so that it could be recognized. 
You may take his sketch map along with you if you like, 
though it won’t help you any more than it did me. If 
I were going to try again, I shouldn’t bother about maps 
or mountains; I should look for a crack in a cliff, and a 
golden-bodied spider hanging in its web. Now you see 
what an excellent chance you have of finding the lost 
bonanza! But I mustn’t keep you any longer listening 
to these old fairy tales. Good-by, and good luck to you. 
Don’t forget to send word back any time you happen to 
meet anybody coming out of the hills.” 

Since the time was now really growing pretty short, 


IN LOST CANYON 


9 


the three did not stand upon the order of their going. 
As they ran through the corridor toward the elevators, 
they saw the crippled man hobbling along in the same 
direction, and making as good speed with the long crutch- 
stride and hop as they did in a dog-trot. That being the 
case, the cripple caught the same descending elevator 
that they did; but on the sidewalk they lost him quickly ; 
were a bit astonished to see him climb nimbly into a wait¬ 
ing taxi and get himself whirled away down the avenue. 

‘TIuh!” said Dick, as they hurried along toward the 
railroad station. “ Tf wishes were horses, beggars would 
ride.^ That fellow looks like a beggar, but he rides in a 
taxi, just the same. I wonder where he is going in such 
a tearing hurry 

There was obviously no answer to this, and the inci¬ 
dent was presently forgotten in their arrival at the sta¬ 
tion. The westbound train was in, and both the Maxwell 
and Donovan families were on hand to see the prospec¬ 
tors off for the summer. Little Purdick, having nobody 
to see him off, got the packs and rifles and put them 
aboard, and when he had finished this job the leave- 
takings were over and the train was pulling out. 

‘^'Good-by, everybody; good-by, everything!’” Dick 
sang, hanging out of the last-left-open vestibule; and 
when he went in to join his two companions he was brim¬ 
ming over with enthusiasm. 

“Hey, you old stick-in-the-muds!” he cried. “She’s 
begun at last—the good old summer out-of-doors! We’re 
due in Nophi at one o’clock, and to-night we’ll be sleeping 
out under the stars! Wouldn’t that jar you, Purdy— 
you old factory-town rat!” 

But little Purdick did not answer, because, just at that 


lO 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


moment, he had caught sight of a roughly dressed man 
with a crutch settling himself in a seat at the far end of 
the day-coach in which they were riding, and the singular 
prevalence of cripples in this part of the Far West struck 
him as being so odd that he scarcely heard what Dick 
was saying. 

The two-hour train rush down the Timanyoni, through 
Little Butte, and up a wide mountain valley to the little 
smelter town of Nophi, nestling fairly under the shadow 
of the Greater Hophras, was a journey made without 
incident—unless dinner in the dining-car, their last civi¬ 
lized meal, as Dick named it, could be called an incident. 
When the boys left the train they found that a telegram 
from Brewster had outrun them, and Uncle Billy’s 
smelter-superintendent friend was at the platform to 
meet them; also, that the two burros, already packed with 
the provisions, tools and camping outfit, were waiting 
under a near-by ore shed. 

As they were preparing to start, Mr. Broadwick gave 
them a hint or two. 

“The snow is just breaking up on the main range, and 
you’ll find the trail for two or three miles each side of 
Mule-Ear Pass pretty hard to negotiate with the jacks 
unless you can catch it while it is frozen,” he told them. 
“Late as it is in the season, it freezes every night on the 
range, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll push as far 
up toward the pass as you can this afternoon, camp early, 
and turn out in the morning early enough to cross the 
range before the sun gets a melting chance at it. If you 
don’t do that, you’re likely to have a lot of trouble with 
the burros. They’re pretty sure-footed little beasts, but 
they will slip off a thawing trail once in a while.” 


IN LOST CANYON 


II 


Larry was the only one who was thoughtful enough 
to ask if anybody had been over the trail since the thawing 
began. 

‘^Yes,” said the smelter superintendent, *‘two men went 
over yesterday with supplies for the Little Eagle mine in 
Dog Gulch. They were experienced packers, and they 
told us they had to wait for the freeze before they could 
make it, coming out.” 

They promised to do as the superintendent advised, 
and five minutes later, under a sun that seemed hot 
enough to make all thoughts of frost and snow troubles 
a sheer absurdity, they were trailing out the single street 
of the small smelter settlement and heading for the Lost 
Canyon portal. 

Just as they were leaving the last shacks of the town 
behind, Purdick, to whom all this wild western stuff was 
as strange as a glimpse into an entirely different world, 
happened to look back down the street. What he saw 
meant nothing to him at first: there were a few stragglers 
in the street, workmen returning to the smelter after the 
noon hour, some children playing in the dust, and the 
usual number of stray dogs foraging for something eatable 
in the empty tin cans littering the roadway. 

But in front of a tar-papered building labeled “Hotel 
Nophi” three horses were hitched, and as Purdick looked 
back, three men came out of the hotel to unhitch and 
mount them. That, in itself, was nothing remarkable, of 
course, and Purdick wouldn’t have given it a second 
thought if he hadn’t happened to see, or think he saw, 
one of the three stick something that looked like a crutch 
under his saddle leather before he climbed to the back of 
his riding animal. 


12 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘Well, ril be jiggered!” he exclaimed, wholly to him¬ 
self. But when Dick said: ‘What for?” Purdick’s reply 
was perfectly non-committal. “Nothing,” he returned, 
with a laugh. “I guess the altitude’s getting on my eye 
nerves and making me see double—or triple.” 

As he spoke, the street, which had now dwindled to a 
rocky bridle path, turned sharply to the left and entered 
the narrow mouth of the canyon; whereupon the brawling 
stream thundering through the gorge swallowed up all 
other sounds, even as the cliff-like walls shut out all 
sights save that of the sky overhead. Nevertheless, as 
the patient little pack animals plodded steadily on, their 
tinkling hoofbeats hardly audible above the noise made 
by the stream, Purdick fancied he could hear heavier 
hoofbeats clinking upon the stones far to the rear. 

That first afternoon’s hike up a canyon trail, which at 
times scarcely afforded footing for the plodding little 
beasts under the pack-saddles, came as near to “getting” 
Purdick as anything he had ever experienced. Having 
never had time—or the spare energy—to do any athletic 
work in college, the toiling tramp, with a blanket roll and 
a gun to carry, made him realize, as he never had before, 
the handicap of untrained muscles and sinews, and as he 
dragged along at the tail of the little procession he was 
chopping out a vow to make the summer outing a turning 
point for a fellow named Charles Purdick in one respect 
at least: if hard work and grit would do it, the end of 
the summer should find him better fitted for man-sized, 
outdoor work or he’d know the reason why. 

Notwithstanding this fine resolution, he heaved a 
mighty sincere sigh of relief when the five-hour trudge up 
the canyon came to an end in one of the park-like widen- 


IN LOST CANYON 


13 


ings of the gorge which had been recurring with increas¬ 
ing frequency during the past hour or so, and Dick called 
to Larry: “Well, old sock; how about it? Isn’t this far 
enough up so that we can hit the pass in the frosty dawn?” 

Larry, who had been leading the foremost burro, 
stopped and gave the landscape the once over. 

“Couldn’t be much better,” he decided. “Plenty of 
wood, good water, and fir boughs for the shake-downs. 
Alabama!” 

“Huh?” said Dick. “What’s Alabama got to do with 
it?” 

Larry gave a wide-mouthed grin. 

“Dig up your U. S. History, sonny. 'Alabama’ means 
'Here we rest.’ All hands on deck to make camp.” 

They went at it like old-timers—or at least two of 
them did. Though they hadn’t had much to do with the 
actual camp-making in their railroad construction experi¬ 
ence of the summer before, Larry and Dick had learned 
pretty well how to make themselves at home in the wilder¬ 
ness. While the setting sun—long since gone behind 
the towering western ranges—was still filling the upper 
air with a flood of golden radiance, they unpacked the 
jacks and picketed them to graze on the lush grass of 
the little park, built the camp-fire, and chopped enough 
of the fragrant fir tips for the beds. 

It was after the fire had burned down to a bed of coals 
that little Purdick began to shine. Out of the hard ex¬ 
perience of his strugglesome boyhood he had brought a 
pretty good knowledge of plain cooking, and in a little 
time he dished up a supper that made his two camp- 
mates pound him on his tired back and bombard him with 
all sorts of jollying praise. 


14 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘We sure got a gilt-edged prize when we picked you 
off the limb, Purdy,” said Dick warmly. “Whatever else 
you can’t do, you sure can cook. I see where you’re 
elected for the whole summer—unless you get your back 
up and go on strike and make us two poison ourselves 
with our own skillet messes. Pretty tired after the hike ?” 

“A little,” Purdick admitted. 

“All right; after we get over the Pass, we won’t push 
it so hard. What say, Larry?” 

“There won’t be any need of pushing it,” was Larry’s 
rejoinder, mumbled through a mouthful of Purdick’s de¬ 
licious, skillet-baked corn bread. “We’re not out to see 
how many miles we can do in a day.” 

With supper eaten and the tin dishes washed in the 
crystal-clear stream, and with the last tints of the sun 
glow gone and the stars coming out in a black bowl of 
the heavens that seemed almost near enough to reach up 
and touch, the three rolled themselves in their blankets 
with their feet to the fire, Dick mumbling something 
about a day well spent earning a night’s repose, and fall¬ 
ing asleep almost as soon as he had stretched himself 
out. 

But little Purdick did not find it quite so simple. For 
one thing, he was too tired to go to sleep at once, and 
for another the unfamiliar surroundings, the black shad¬ 
ows of the trees, the hollow drumming of the little river 
among the boulders in its bed, the high-mountain silence 
which was otherwise unbroken, the stately procession of 
the stars in a sky that was like an arch of black velvet— 
all these things conspired to make him wakeful, and after 
a time he got up, dug out the mineralogy book from 
Larry’s pack, stirred the fire to make it give light enough 


IN LOST CANYON 


15 


to read by, and was presently deep in the mysteries of 
sylvanite and sphalerite and chalcopyrite, B.B. tests, acid 
reactions, and the like. 

In a little time he began to realize that even a June 
night at altitude eight or nine thousand feet can be pretty 
chilly, so he wrapped himself in his blankets and put his 
back against a tree. In the new position the firelight 
wasn’t very good for the reading purpose, and before 
long he found his eyes growing heavy and finally the 
'‘Dana” slipped from his grasp and he was asleep. 

This was the last he knew until he awoke with a start 
some time farther along in the night; came broad awake 
with a conviction that a noise, other than that of the 
brawling stream, had broken into the high-mountain 
silence. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked 
around. The fire had died down to a pile of white-ashed 
embers, but the starlight, as strong in the clear atmos¬ 
phere of the heights as modified moonlight, enabled him 
to see the dim outlines of his surroundings. 

While he looked and listened, the noise which had 
aroused him came again; a measured tapping alternating 
with the crunch of slow footfalls. Straining his eyes, he 
soon made out a shadowy figure dodging along from tree 
to tree and working its way cautiously toward the dying 
camp-fire. 

Purdick’s first impulse was to call Dick and Larry; his 
next was to half close his eyes and pretend to be still 
asleep. Nearer and nearer came the tap and shuffle, until 
at last he was able to get a fair sight of the midnight 
intruder. It was a man with a crutch, and the watcher 
under the big fir-tree didn’t have to look twice to decide 
that his errand’wasn’t neighborly. For now the man was 


i6 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


down on hands and knees and was crawling up as noise¬ 
lessly as a snake. 

Thinking it over afterward, Purdick could never tell 
why he didn’t immediately raise an alarm. A yell would 
have awakened his sleeping camp-mates, and would prob¬ 
ably have sent the intruder flying. But instead of fling¬ 
ing off his blanket and shouting to Larry and Dick, little 
Purdick merely tried to give a better imitation of a sleep¬ 
ing sentinel and let the crippled man come on. 

What happened after that was wholly unexplainable to 
the watcher under the fir-tree. Creeping silently into the 
diminished circle of firelight, the cripple possessed him¬ 
self first of Larry’s pack and then of Dick’s, going 
through them rapidly but painstakingly, as if in search 
of something. Next, Purdick saw his own pack going 
through the same process. Like a suddenly illuminating 
flash of lightning, the explanation blazed into Purdick’s 
brain. The cripple was the man who had come into 
Mr. Starbuck’s office just as they were about to leave. 
He had overheard the talk of the Golden Spider, the lost 
gold mine, and he was searching for old Jimmie Brock’s 
map! 


CHAPTER II 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 

W HEN Purdick realized that the rummaging cripple 
was not only a camp thief, but most probably a 
desperado of sorts, he saw where he had made a capital 
mistake in not arousing his two companions while it 
could have been done with safety. It was too late now. 
The man was within arm’s reach of the two sleeping 
figures, and he was armed; at least, he was using a vicious- 
looking hunting-knife to cut the pack lashings. 

Purdick held his breath. The little pencil sketch made 
by the old prospector had been put into the envelope con¬ 
taining the Survey maps; and the envelope, as Purdick 
knew, had been placed between the leaves of the miner¬ 
alogy book for safe-keeping and carriage. The book was 
lying beside him, just where it had slipped out of his hands 
when he had fallen asleep. Would the thief see the book 
and look in it? 

It seemed useless to hope that he wouldn’t. With the 
curious perversity with which inanimate things appear to 
be endowed at times, the camp-fire blazed up and a resiny 
twig made a candle of itself, illuminating the camp area 
like a small searchlight. Purdick made sure that the 
crippled scoundrel couldn’t miss seeing the book lying in 
plain sight; the book and the end of the map-holding en¬ 
velope sticking out of it; and again he held his breath. 

17 


i8 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


That, in itself, was unnerving enough, but the sight he 
got of the cripple’s face was even more so. He hadn’t 
noticed the man’s face particularly when the cripple had 
hobbled into and out of Mr. Starbuck’s office in Brewster, 
but now he saw that it was a perfect mask of sly and 
ferocious villainy, and he had a swift and terrifying con¬ 
viction that the thief would use his knife murderously if 
any of his victims showed signs of awakening. 

With that conviction half paralyzing him, Purdick’s 
heart fairly stopped beating when he saw Dick Maxwell 
stretch his arms over his head and yawn as if he were 
about to wake up. Instantly the man quit rummaging 
and caught up his knife. Little Purdick had never felt 
so helpless in all his life. In propping himself against 
the tree he had wrapped his blankets around him so 
tightly that he couldn’t get out of them without a struggle. 
None the less, he was drawing his feet up to be ready for 
the struggle when Dick rolled over on his side, gave a 
snort, and was apparently fast asleep again. The peril 
was over, for the moment, at least, and Purdick’s stopped 
heart began to thump furiously, hammering so hard that 
he wondered why the thief didn’t hear it and spring 
at him. 

In the reaction which was bound to follow a shock like 
that, Purdick closed his eyes, and tried vainly for a few 

I 

moments to fight down the sickening dizziness that was 
threatening to blot him out. When he looked again, the 
man had seemingly given up the search for the map. 
Cautiously, with his knife between his teeth, and one 
arm thrust through his crutch to drag it along, he was 
gathering up the three rifles and making off with them. 

Once more little Purdick fought down a frantic im- 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 


19 


pulse to yell out to the two sleepers. Without the guns 
they would be helpless. But he knew that the cripple “ 
wasn’t alone in the canyon; that somewhere, and probably 
near at hand, were the two men who had ridden out of 
Nophi with him. It was only the thought that the other 
two might be near enough to hear his yell and open fire 
on the camp that enabled Purdick to keep still at this 
crisis. But he had to bite his tongue to do it. 

While the crippled marauder was crawling away, drag¬ 
ging the three guns and his crutch, and making hard 
work of it, Purdick’s resolve was swiftly taken. Noise¬ 
lessly he disentangled himself from the impeding blank¬ 
ets, never losing sight for an instant of the crawling 
figure working its way toward the lower narrowing of 
the park-like opening. Never had the little fellow so 
bitterly resented the fate that had made him undersized 
and, in a certain sense, a physical weakling. With Larry’s 
strength, or even Dick’s, he could have landed upon the 
back of the creeping thief and made him drop the rifles. 

He had just about made up his mind to try it, anyhow, 
when a diversion came. Seen dimly by the flickering 
light of the blazing twig, the cripple was stopping beside 
a great boulder which had some time fallen from the 
cliffs on the opposite side of the little river and rolled 
across to the intervale level. Little Purdick prayed for 
a better light, and got it—just for an illuminating instant ; 
just long enough to let him see that the man was poking 
the three guns under an overhanging lip of the great rock 
to hide them. 

This was better; much better; and as the departing 
thief lifted himself upon his one serviceable foot and his 
crutch to continue on his way down the canyon, Purdick 


20 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

darted quickly into the shadow of the firs and prepared 
to follow. 

The pursuit did not take him very far. Less than a 
quarter of a mile below the camp site there was another 
opening in the canyon, with a little side gulch leading 
off to the left. In the mouth of this gulch Purdick saw 
the glow of a camp-fire, and he could dimly make out 
the figures of two men sitting beside it. While he looked, 
the cripple hobbled down the trail ahead of him and 
joined the two at the fire. Here, so Purdick determined, 
was his chance to find out what the desperadoes purposed 
doing, so he called up all the Indian-stalking stories he 
had ever read and crept down upon the camp in the 
gulch. 

Luckily, he didn’t have to be Indian-silent in making 
his approach. Woodcraft was only a dictionary word to 
him, as yet, and twigs would snap and stones roll under 
his feet, in spite of all he could do. But the brawling 
stream, along the edge of which he was making his way, 
swallowed up all the clumsy noises, and in a few minutes 
he had climbed to a little thicket of low-growing fir sap¬ 
lings on the gulch side, from the shelter of which he 
could both see and hear, and could look down at a sharp 
angle into the very heart of the small camp-fire and upon 
the men surrounding it. 

As he came within listening range, the crippled spy 
was just finishing his report. 

“No, I didn’t find th’ map; I just took a chance at 
that,” he was saying. “One o’ them’s likely got it in his 
pocket. What I wanted was the guns, an’ I got ’em. 
Not that a bunch o’ boys like them would put up a fight; 
but without th’ artillery, they can’t, d’ye see?” 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 


21 


“Why didn’t yuh bring the guns in with yuh?” growled 
the bigger of the two who hadn’t left the camp-fire. 

“Too much trouble. I hid ’em where they’ll never 
find ’em.” 

“Well,” said the big man, “do we go on up and scare 
the kids out of a year’s growth? Are you sure they’ve 
got the map? It was talked around in Nophi that they 
was goin’ out hunting f’r tungsten, an’ the like o’ that.” 

“Didn’t I see it with my own eyes?” snapped the 
cripple. “An’ didn’t I hear Starbuck tellin’ ’em all about 
th’ Golden Spider? ’Tis a sure thing, I tell you! This 
tungsten business is all a frame-up. Starbuck’s got a 
safe pointer on that gold mine, and he’s sendin’ the boys 
because he figures that nobody’d think a bunch o’ college 
boys’d be out for anything but a good time in th’ big 
hills.” 

“Well,” said the smaller of the two fire-keepers, “this 
is your show, Twisty. What do you say?” 

“There’s only one thing to say. If we could get over 
Mule-Ear with th’ bronc’s. I’d say, let ’em go on ahead an 
find th’ mine f’r us. But th’ horses can’t make the trail, 
an’ it thawin’ an’ freezin’ every day, though the jacks 
can. We’ll wait f’r an hour ’r so, till the trail’s froze 
good an’ hard, then we’ll go up an’ get th’ map an’ the 
jacks and their outfit and grub-stake an’ go on.” 

“Leavin’ the kids behind, yuh mean?” said the big man. 

“Surest thing you know 1” barked the cripple. “They’ll 
find their way back to Nophi, an’ that’ll be the end of it.” 

“But if we leave the horses, that’ll give us away,” 
objected the third robber. 

“I fixed that before we left Nophi,” said the man with 
a crutch. “Barkey Davis’ll be on his way up the canyon 


22 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


at daybreak, and if he finds the bronc's left behind, he’ll 
take ’em back. If he don’t find ’em, he’ll know we’ve 
gone on. ’Tis all fixed.” 

But the third man was still unsatisfied. ‘We’re too 
near the town,” he said. “I know Billy Starbuck, and 
so do you. Th’ boys’ll get back to Nophi in a day, and 
that'll mean a sheriff’s posse, with Starbuck headin’ it. 
It’s too risky.” 

“Risky nothing!” was the snapping retort. “ ’Tis you 
with a yellow streak in you, Tom Dowling! How’s thim 
b’ys goin’ to know who holds ’em up in the dark? An’ 
with th’ snow thawin’ every day on the range, who’s 
goin’ to trail us over Mule-Ear?” And the cripple spat 
in the fire to emphasize his disgust. 

Little Purdick had heard enough, and more than 
enough. In an hour, more or less, their camp would be 
raided, everything they had would be taken away from 
them, and they would be set afoot in the wilderness to 
make their way back to civilization as best they might. 
Stealthily he began to back out of his hiding place under 
the low-growing saplings. Flight, a swift race back to 
Dick and Larry with the tremendous news, was the next 
number on the programme. 

Before he could give himself the first backing shove, 
Purdick found that he was shaking with nervousness, and 
he had to wait for a minute or two until he could get 
the trembling fit under control. The little pause came 
near proving hideously disastrous. In moving back he 
had disturbed a round stone the size of a man’s head, 
and before he could grab at it, it had gotten away and 
was rolling down the declivity. When it started, Purdick 
thought it was all over with him; the stone was headed 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 


23 


straight for the fire in the gulch. But in its second turn¬ 
over it struck one of the small trees, was turned aside 
and went plunging down the other declivity into the 
stream at the right. 

Purdick flattened himself to the earth until he had a 
feeling that he was no thicker than a sheet of paper, and 
he hardly dared to breathe. Two of the three men at the 
fire—the two with sound legs—sprang up at the noise of 
the plunge, but the cripple sat still and laughed raucously. 

“Youse fellies ain’t got the nerve of a couple o’ jack- 
rabbits!” he sneered. “Did yuh think th’ little sleepin’ 
b’ys was cornin’ down here to scrag us? ’Twas only a 
rock rollin’ round in the creek.” 

Purdick had his shaking fit well in hand by this time, 
and once more he started to back away, testing every 
rock as he retreated to the stream level to make sure that 
it was fastened down before he put his weight upon it. 
Once on the trail, and around the first crook in the can¬ 
yon, he began to run at top speed—and kept that up for 
just about twenty yards—which was all the distance it 
took to make him understand that when a fellow has lived 
all his life at an altitude of a few hundred feet above 
sea-level, he can’t run to do any good in the tall hills; at 
least, not until his lungs have grown big enough to take 
in more of the rarefied air at a gulp. 

So it was a pretty badly winded scout who presently 
staggered into the upper camp opening and flung him¬ 
self upon his two soundly sleeping comrades. Of the two, 
Larry came broad awake at the first alarm, but Dick had 
to be shaken vigorously before he could be made to sit 
up and listen to the story that Purdick was gasping out. 

“Well, I’ll be dinged!—you good old sleuth!’' was 



24 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Dick’s praiseful comment, after Purdick had made them 
understand what had been happening while they slept. 
“Played ’possum and didn’t let him know you were awake ? 
But why didn’t you yell out for us?” 

“I meant to, at first, of course,” said Purdick. “But 
I waited too long. When he got up right here between 
you two with that butcher knife, I was afraid to. What 
are we going to do? They said they’d wait an hour or 
so, but they’re liable to change their minds and rush us 
any minute.” 

Larry Donovan was the one who knew what was to 
be done, and he was already doing part of it. Quickly 
throwing a handful of twigs upon the fire to make a 
better light, he began to roll his blankets and to gather 
up the scattered contents of his pack. 

“Get busy, fellows,” he said quietly. “If you’ve got it 
straight, Purdy, we may have all the time we need to get 
out of here—or we may not have.” 

“Gee!” gasped Dick, falling upon his own preparations 
with a rush; “you mean that we’ve got to tackle the 
Mule-Ear trail in the dark?” 

“It’s that, or a stand-up fight with these plug-uglies,” 
Larry returned coolly. “Knowing what we do, I suppose 
we’d be justified in ambushing the gang as they come up 
the canyon, but I’m sure none of us want to start this 
summer job of ours by shooting down a bunch of mine- 
robbers, much as they deserve it. The other thing to do 
is to light out before they get to us. And we don’t have 
to do it in the dark either; see there?” and he pointed to 
a thin crescent of a moon in its last quarter which was 
just beginning to show itself above the high eastern 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 25 

mountain. Then to Purdick, “Purdy, you go and corral 
those guns, while I make up your pack.’^ 

Going over it afterward, all three of the boys thought 
they were well within the truth in claiming that no camp 
was ever broken with less loss of time, even by trained 
burro-freighters, than theirs was that night. In a very 
few minutes the jack-loads were made up and cinched 
on the pack saddles, each man’s shoulder-pack was slung, 
and they were ready for the trail. 

Larry, dropping into place as leader in the flight, gave 
his final directions after Dick had brought a hatful of 
water from the stream with which to extinguish the 
camp-fire. 

“I was studying the Survey map as we came up on the 
train, and if Pve got the right idea of where we are now, 
we have a pretty long, hard pull ahead of us to reach 
the top of the pass. We must make the best time we can 
while the going is good, because we can’t rush much after 
we hit the old snow. We’ll let old Fishbait”—they had 
already named the two burros—“show us the way. He 
can find the trail better than we can. All set ? Here we 
go, then.” 

Happily, the up-canyon trail was easy at the start. Be¬ 
yond the little park in which their camp had been pitched 
there were a few narrow places where the footing at the 
stream side was somewhat hazardous, with only the thin 
moonlight to show them where it was; but very shortly 
the gorge widened out into a valley with precipitous, 
wooded mountain slopes on either side. Here the trail 
was broad enough to enable them to break the Indian- 
file order of march; and Dick and Larry made Purdick 
repeat his overhearings at the camp of the desperadoes. 


26 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“Wait a minute/’ Dick interrupted; “let’s see if I’m 
getting it straight. Were they meaning to leave the 
horses behind when they came up to raid us?” 

“That’s the way I understood it,” said Purdick. 

“Then when they do come up and find us gone, they’ll 
have to go back after the horses before they can follow 
us.” 

“Which is lucky for us,” Larry put in. “As long as 
the trail stays as good as it is right along here, they can 
cover three miles to our one. How far did you say it 
was from our camp back to theirs, Purdy?” 

“I’m no good at guessing distances in a crooked can¬ 
yon in the dark,” Purdick admitted. “But it can’t be 
over a short quarter of a mile.” 

“Not much comfort in that,” Larry grumbled. “Did 
you see the horses?” 

“No; but I couldn’t see much of anything. Their fire 
was built in a little side gulch and it didn’t shine out into 
the main canyon, and the moon wasn’t up, then.” 

“Our best hope is that they’re not hurrying about put¬ 
ting the raiding job over,” was Dick’s contribution to the 
discussion. “If they’ll only give us time to reach the bad 
going-” 

The interruption was the distant crack of a rifle, a 
single shot that repeated itself in a series of battledore 
and shuttlecock echoes from the mountain sides on either 
hand. 

“What does that mean?” Dick demanded. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Larry. “But if 
you ask me, I’ll say it’s a signal. Just for a try at it, 
suppose two of them have come up to put the raiding 
job over. They’ve found the birds flown, and now 



THE FROZEN TRAIL 27 

they’re telling the third man to come on with the horses. 
Am I right?” 

'1 believe you are as right as rain,” Dick agreed 
quickly. “In which case?-” 

“In which case, it’s us for the speedway!” Larry ex¬ 
claimed, and forthwith he urged the little pack animals 
into their nearest approach to a trot. 

“If we can’t beat that bunch to the bad going, it’s up 
to us to make a fight or get ready to tramp back to Nophi 
with our tongues hanging out. Get along, Fishbait! If 
you only had sense enough to know what’s behind you, 
you’d make tracks a lot faster than you’re making them 
now I” 

That was the beginning of a blind race which was made 
all the more difficult by the fact that the fugitives never 
knew a minute ahead what they were coming to next. 
If they had been familiar with the trail it would have 
been different. But they had to trust wholly to the instinct 
of the leading burro, and at times, when the little beast 
and its pack mate went plunging through dense thickets 
of the young trees, they were reasonably sure they were 
off the track. 

Also, in a very short while the pace began to tell, par¬ 
ticularly upon little Purdick. By the time they reached 
muddy going, the high, upper valley where patches of 
the old snow were showing dimly among the tree trunks, 
with leaky rivulets trickling down from them to make a 
spongy swamp of the footway, Purdick was gasping for 
breath and lagging behind the procession, in spite of all 
his efforts to keep up. 

“Getting next to you, old scout?” said Larry, leaving 
Dick to urge the pack beasts on while he dropped back 



28 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


to relieve Purdick of the weight of his gun. 'This is a 
pretty hard row of stumps to put you into—the first 
crack out of the box, this way.” 

"Pm—Pm all right,” the small one stammered gamely. 
‘Tf I—if I could only—could only get my second 
wind-” 

"That’s it,” said Larry encouragingly. "It’ll come, 
after a bit. But if it’s too hard for you, we’ll let up a 
few notches. Dick and I are more or less used to these 
altitudes, and-” 

"L-l-let up, nothing!” stuttered the game laggard. 
"Wh-when I can’t hold up my end you can ch-chuck me 
into the creek and leave me behind!” 

It was the trail itself that presently cut the speed down 
to something less breathless. Within the next five hun¬ 
dred yards the spongy swamp underfoot had become 
snowy slush, and with another hundred feet or so of 
elevation the slush began to crunch encouragingly under 
their feet to tell them that they were at least reaching 
the zone of nightly frosts. 

Here, too, the forests were receding on the approach 
to timber line, with steep, snow-covered slopes to take 
their place, and in consequence, the light was immeasur¬ 
ably better; so good, indeed, that they could now see the 
trail quite plainly, part of the time as a deeply trodden 
path between snowbanks, and in other places a hard- 
frozen ridge from which the snow, thawing in the June 
sun, had sunk away. 

It was remarkable how the sure-footed little pack ani¬ 
mals were able to climb steadily, rarely slipping on the 
icy track, and plodding along at a walk so fast that it 
pushed the three boys to keep up with them on the slip- 





THE FROZEN TRAIL 


29 


pery ascent. It was Dick, who had made one winter trip 
into the mountains a couple of years earlier, who cau¬ 
tioned his companions about the danger of slipping from 
the trail. 

“Look out in these ridgy places,” he warned. “If you 
slip aside, you’re a goner; just as likely as not you’ll drop 
into a drift twenty feet deep. I did that little thing 
once, and-” 

Before he could tie anything to the “and,” there was 
a shout from the rear, and the place in the trail which 
had lately been occupied by little Purdick was vacant. 

“Hold up, Larry!—Purdy’s taken a dive!” Dick yelled, 
and the procession was halted. On the lower side of the 
trail, at the spot where Purdick had been last seen, there 
was a round hole in the snow crust. It was neither as 
deep as a well nor as wide as a church door, but, like 
Mercutio’s wound, it served. Down in the bottom of it 
a disturbance, much like that in the pit of an ant-lion 
when that active little bug is burrowing with its prey, 
was going on to an accompaniment of smothered cries. 

“Don’t fight yourself to death!” Dick called out. 
“We’ll get you in a minute.” Then to Larry: “Grab me 
by the feet—I’m going after him”—which he did, head 
foremost, to be dragged back a moment later, bringing 
the buried one with him. 

“B-r-r-r!” shivered little Purdick, beating the snow 
out of his clothes; “if anybody had ever told me that I 
was scheduled to take a snow bath in June—whoosh! it’s 
all down inside of me 1” 

“It’ll melt in a little while,” said Dick consolingly. 
“I’ve been there, too, and I know how it feels. But we’d 
better be humping ourselves. If I’m not mightily mis- 



30 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


taken I can hear those horses coming up the canyon trail 
right now! Listen!’’ 

They did listen, and there was no reason to doubt 
Dick’s acuteness of hearing. Far back along the way 
they had come they could hear the clink of horseshoes 
upon stone; and the horses were evidently being pushed 
to their best up-hill speed. 

‘Tt’s still up to us,” said Larry. ^Tf we can turn that 
high gulch shoulder up ahead before they get out of the 
timber. ... I don’t know whether they’d go so far as 
to try to murder us, but as long as we’re out on the bare 
snow slope we make a pretty plain target, in this moon¬ 
light.” 

That meant more haste, combined with a good bit of 
uncertainty as to the result. The trail had now become a 
winding zigzag up the snow-covered slope, and until it 
turned to head into one of the higher gulches, any ob¬ 
ject upon it as big as three marching figures and two 
loaded pack animals would stick out like a sore thumb 
against the white background from any lower point of 
view at the edge of timber line. So the question of escape 
hung once more upon the matter of speed. If they could 
disappear in the gulch before the pursuers reached the 
foot of the snow slope, the worst would be over. 

They made it, finally, though by the narrowest possible 
margin. Just after they had urged the blown burros 
around the projecting rocky shoulder which hid them, the 
three panting climbers turned to look back. Down at the 
edge of the timber, fully five hundred feet below, they 
saw three mounted men push out upon the lower reaches 
of the trail. Larry shifted his rifle from his shoulder to 
the crook of his arm. 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 


31 


“TheyTe going to try it, anyway,” he said slowly. ‘Tf 
their horses are sharp-shod, they may be able to make it. 

I don’t know but what it’s going to come to a fight, after 
all.” 

Contrary to everything Larry had ever known of him, 
Dick Maxwell was the one who counseled patience and a 
renewed effort to escape. 

“I’d hate to see it come to gun-play,” he said. “It 
would be a pretty savage way to start our summer. Let’s 
not fight until we have to, anyway, Larry.” 

But Larry Donovan was made of somewhat grimmer 
stuff. 

“Goodness knows, I don’t want to kill anybody,” he 
protested. “But there’s this much about it, and I’m saying 
it to both of you. These wolves mean business. They 
think they’re on the sure trail of a gold mine, and we 
know what we may expect if they overtake us. If they 
can make the trail on horseback, as they are trying to, 
right now, it is only a question of a little time until they’ll 
chase us into a comer.” 

“Well?” queried Dick. “What have you got up your 
sleeve ?” 

“This. As long as we’re climbing the hill, we’ve got 
the advantage. We’ll make the pass if we can, and take 
cover, if we can find any. I don’t want to kill a man, 
any more than you do, but if they are still trying to get 
at us, we’ll have to take a crack at the horses, in sheer 
self-defense.” 

That was the way it was left when they resumed their 
march along the frozen trail whose windings presently 
led them so far around the mountain that they lost sight 
of the snow slope over which they had climbed to reach 


32 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


the high gulch. Before they had headed the gulch to 
come out upon the bare, wind-stripped slope over which 
the trail doubled back toward the pass, the crescent moon 
which had thus far lighted them upon their way began 
to pale in the first flush of the coming dawn. Just ahead 
they could see the comparatively shallow depression in 
the mountain range which marked their goal, and in a 
few minutes more the toiling ascent was accomplished 
and they stood on the bald summit of the pass. 

It was this last ascent that gave them the elevated view¬ 
point from which they could trace the backward windings 
of the trail almost all the way down to the place where it 
emerged from the timber. In the increasing dawn light 
they could make out, far below them, the three horsemen 
like black insects crawling along on the snow sheet. While 
they looked, one of the insects paused, appeared to dance 
for an instant, and then disappeared, and they knew that 
one of the horses had slipped from the icy trail to plunge 
aside into a snowdrift. 

‘That ought to settle them,” said little Purdick, making 
a pair of shades out of his curved hands to shut out the 
snow glare, as he watched the struggle going on below. 
‘They’ve still got the worst of it ahead of them, if they 
only knew it.” 

For a few minutes the three watchers stood motion¬ 
less, looking on at the efforts of the two men who remained 
on the trail to get their submerged comrade out of the 
drift. When the thing was Anally accomplished it was 
at the cost of the loss of a horse. Quite plainly they saw 
the freed and plunging animal break its way out of the 
drift and paw its way up to the surface of hard-frozen 
crust, only to lose its footing and go whirling and sliding 


THE FROZEN TRAIL 


33 


down the steep, mile-long toboggan slide of the slope 
below, growing smaller and smaller until at last it disap¬ 
peared entirely. 

Dick Maxwell took off his hat and waved it as the 
three men on the trail, leading the two remaining horses, 
turned and began to creep back down the path of hazard 
which had proved so nearly fatal to at least one of them. 

‘^Good-by, you hold-ups!” he shouted, as if he could 
make himself heard over the half-mile or more of inter¬ 
vening height and distance. ^^Sorry you’ve lost your 
nerve, but we’re mighty glad to see the last of you, just 
the same. Good-by!” 

"‘Don’t you be too sure about having seen the last of 
them,” Larry put in soberly. “If they really believe we 
can show them the way to the Golden Spider, and so give 
them a chance to 'jump’ it, they’ll not give up so easily. 
You must remember that the summer is still young.” 

“Summer?” said Dick, with a shiver; “it seems as if it 
might be Christmas up here with all this snow.” Then 
to Purdick, who was untying the cooking utensils hang¬ 
ing from Fishbait’s pack saddle: “What’s on your mind, 
Purdy ?” 

“Coffee,” said Purdick. “I feel as if I’d been up all 
night. Which pack was the solidified alcohol put in?” 

Nobody remembered, so there had to be a search made 
in both jack packs, since there was no fuel of any sort 
on the high, wind-swept barren of the pass. The emer¬ 
gency cartridges were found, after a time, and Purdick 
rigged the tripod of the alcohol stove and put a cookerful 
of clean snow on to melt. That done, he began rum¬ 
maging in the packs again, methodically at first, but a 
little later with feverish haste. 


34 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


'Tell us what you’re looking for and maybe we can 
help you find it,” said Larry, coming back from a short 
excursion to the western side of the pass where he had 
been giving the downward trail the once over. 

'The book,” Purdick answered gaspingly; "the 'Dana’ 
with the maps in it! Which one of you put it away?” 

"I haven’t seen it since we left Nophi,” was Larry’s 
rejoinder; and Dick also pleaded an alibi. 

Purdick sank back on his heels and his face was white. 

"Didn’t—didn’t either one of you pick it up last night 
at the canyon camp and put it in one of the packs?” he 
demanded. 

"Pick it up? From where?” Dick asked. 

"Off the ground. I sat up, reading in it, after you 
fellows had turned in, and when I dropped asleep it fell 
out of my hands.. It was lying there beside me while 
that cripple was going through the packs, and I was 
scared stiff for fear he’d see it and see the map envelope 
sticking out of it. After that, I never thought of it once 
until this minute. It’s gone, and it’s all my fault! I told 
you two you were loading yourselves up with a hoodoo in 
bringing me along, and this proves it. We can’t make a 
single test without the 'Dana,’ or locate anything without 
the Government maps. Worse than all, those hold-ups 
will probably find the book on their way back through 
the canyon, and that’ll end it 1” 



CHAPTER III 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


C ONSTERNATION was about the only word that 
fitted when Purdick had told the tale of the lost 
book. What he had said was perfectly true. Though they 
were all three taking engineering courses in college, no 
one of them knew enough about mineralogy as a science 
to do any practical prospecting for metals without a text¬ 
book. Besides, there were the Government maps; lacking 
them, they could never locate a claim, so as to be able to 
tell where it was situated, even if they should be lucky 
enough to find one. 

At the moment, none of them thought much of the loss 
of James Brock’s little sketch map of the Golden Spider. 
Uncle Billy Starbuck’s evident conviction that the lost 
mine would never be found unless it was by pure acci¬ 
dent had its effect; and, anyway, the real business of the 
summer was to be a search for the baser, though not less 
valuable, metals. And unless they could determine the 
presence of these—as they couldn’t hope to without the 
help of the ‘‘Dana,” there was no use in going on. 

^Well,” said Dick, drawing a long breath, 'hhat fixes 
us, good and plenty. I guess it’s us for a hike back to 
Nophi, and a wait until we can wire for another copy of 
the book and another set of the Survey maps.” 

Larry shook his head. 


35 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


36 

‘TPs likely to be a good, long wait. That copy of the 
‘Dana’ was the only one to be found in Brewster—so 
the man that sold it to me said; and the maps will prob¬ 
ably have to come from Washington.” 

It was here that little Purdick had his say. 

“This crazy break is on me and nobody else,” he cut 
in. “I had no business to forget the book when we were 
packing up last night. If you fellows will wait here for 
me, I’ll go back after it.” 

“A lot of good that would do!” said Dick. “Those 
three hold-ups will be on the trail ahead of you, and you 
can bet they won’t miss finding the book in daylight, if 
they did overlook it last night.” 

“I know,” Purdick went on, “but it’s up to me to try it, 
just the same. I deserve all that’s coming to me.” 

At this, both of the others protested vigorously. 
There was little chance that the returning desperadoes 
wouldn’t find the book as they passed the camp site; and 
Larry and Dick both urged, with a good deal of truth, 
that Purdick was too “soft” to tackle the job; unfit, and 
too unused to roughing it in the open. Purdick let them 
go on until they had talked themselves out, but he wouldn’t 
give up. 

“What you say is so true that it hurts,” he came back. 
“All the same. I’m going. I made the break, and it’s my 
job to patch it up, if I can. All I want to know is 
whether you’ll wait for me here, or at the foot of the 
pass on the other side.” 

Dick and Larry exchanged glances. One of Purdick’s 
outstanding qualities—the one by which he was best 
known in Old Sheddon—was a certain patient, gamey 
obstinacy that never knew when it was beaten. They 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


37 


knew that if he had made up his mind to do penance for 
his neglect by going back, he’d go, no matter what they 
might say. 

Larry took the bull, or rather the dilemma, by the 
horns. 

“It isn’t all on you, Purdy. I sent you down to the big 
rock last night to get the guns, and told you I’d make up 
your pack. So we can split the blame.” Then to Dick: 
“Think you could navigate these mules of ours down the 
western trail alone ?” 

“Sure I can,” Dick asserted. 

“All right,” Larry went on; “I’ve got a scheme. As I 
told you, I soaked up good and plenty on those Survey 
maps yesterday, and I believe I can find a shorter way 
back to the canyon than the one the regular trail takes 
around that long loop at the head of the valley. Hustle 
us a quick bite of breakfast, Purdy, and I’ll go along 
with you. There’s just about one chance in a hundred 
that we may be able to beat those hold-ups to it.” 

Purdick demurred a little to this, still insisting that the 
fault was his and that he ought to pay the penalty alone. 
But he did not let his objections delay things. The water 
was boiling, and with the pot of coffee made, a few 
slices of bacon fried over the alcohol blaze, and a box of 
biscuits opened, they bolted a hasty breakfast. With 
the draining of the coffee pot the plan of action was 
outlined. 

Since there was no feed for the burros on the barren 
pass, Larry’s suggestion that Dick go on down the western 
slope with the pack animals had to be accepted, so it was 
arranged that he was to push on, stopping to wait for 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


38 

Larry and Purdick to catch up when he should reach the 
first good grazing ground for the jacks. 

‘We ought to be able to overtake you by to-night, or 
early to-morrow morning, at the latest,” Larry said, “but 
if we don’t show up as soon as you think we ought to, 
don’t worry. We’ll do the best we can, and we’re going 
to travel mighty light.” And to prove it he discarded 
shoulder pack, rifle and ammunition, taking only a small 
camp axe for equipment, while Purdick took provisions 
enough for two meals in a light haversack, and nothing 
else. 

“There’s only one thing the matter with this lay-out 
of ours,” Dick said, as his companions were preparing to 
leave him. “Suppose you don’t find the book where 
Purdy dropped it—what then?” 

That was a sort of an impasse to give them pause, as 
the old writers used to say. If they shouldn’t find the 
book, they would be worse off than ever. But Larry 
Donovan was of the breed of those who cross bridges 
when they come to them—and not before. 

“We’ve got to take a chance on that;” he said quickly. 
“You can’t keep the jacks here all day with nothing to 
eat; they’ve got to either go on or go back. We’ll be 
with you again by to-morrow morning, book or no book. 
And then, if we haven’t got what we went after, we can 
decide what is best to do. Come on, Purdy. We’re losing 
precious time.” 

The start was made without more ado, but instead of 
taking the trail over which they had reached the pass, 
Larry led the way around the sloping shoulder of the 
northern peak, kicking himself footholds in the frozen 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


39 

snow crust, and thereby taking long chances, as he well 
knew, of breaking through into some bottomless drift. 

‘‘Step light and walk in my tracks, and for Pat’s sake 
don’t slip!” he called back to Purdick; but the caution 
was hardly needed. Purdick still had a vivid mental pic¬ 
ture of the freed horse of the hold-ups whirling and 
slipping and shooting down to oblivion over the skating- 
rink surface of the snow slope, and he was all claws to 
clutch and hang as he followed Larry around the steepest 
part of the shoulder. 

Past the steep shoulder they came out upon what the 
Alpine climbers called an arrete; a ridge sloping gently 
down and roughly paralleling the main range on their 
left and Lost Canyon on the right and far below. This 
ridge was what Larry had been aiming for. Its rocky 
crest had been blown clear of the winter snows; it was 
taking them in the right direction; there was good foot¬ 
ing; and the descent was rapid enough to let them take 
a dog-trot without cutting their wind too severely. 

“Don’t let me wear you out,” Larry cautioned; “but 
here’s where we’ve got to make time, if we’re going to 
beat those plug-uglies back to our camp site in the canyon. 
Are you good for the dog-trot?” 

“Plenty good, so long as it’s down-hill,” panted the 
runner-up. “But I don’t see where we’re making any¬ 
thing. We can never get down to the canyon off of this 
thing.” 

“Wait,” Larry flung back, “and I’ll show you.” 

From the top of the high ridge they could get occa¬ 
sional glimpses of the trail winding down the deep valley 
to the canyon head, and one of these glimpses gave them 
a sight of the baffled hold-ups making their way slowly 


40 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


along the slippery path, two riding and one walking; 
mere black dots they were, visible only because the daz¬ 
zling white surroundings made them so. 

^'We’re breaking even with ’em!” said Larry, lengthen¬ 
ing the stride of the dog-trot by imperceptible degrees. 
“They’ve got a good mile of the snow trail to crawl over 
yet, and then another mile of the slush and mud. I be¬ 
lieve we’re going to make it, after all.” 

“Yes; but we’re a mile above the canyon, and this 
ridge will never take us down to it!” Purdick gasped 
out. 

“Wait, and you’ll see,” was all Larry would say; but 
as he ran he was studying the lay of the land harder than 
he had ever boned Math, in the college year which had 
just ended. Far down the ridge little patches of dark 
green showed where a straggling vanguard of the firs 
had pushed its way a full half-mile above the normal 
timber, and it was toward the scattering and stunted trees 
that he was directing their flight. 

“If you can manage to hold out until we get to those 
trees,” he called back to the lagging runner-up. “Think 
you can do it?”' 

Little Purdick didn’t stop to think; he was putting the 
whole battery of mind and will upon the business of keep¬ 
ing his legs waggling. Long before the tree patches were 
reached, those legs had become base deserters from the 
animal kingdom and had gone over bodily to the vege¬ 
table. Pumping for breath like a spent miler on a cinder 
path, Purdick could fancy that his legs were mere blocks 
of wood hung in some mysterious manner to his body by 
hinges that were sadly in need of oiling. But, just the 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


41 


same, they continued to waggle. That was the main 
thing. 

None the less, when the race for Larry’s goal was won, 
Purdick was done, finished, eerase, as our French friends 
would put it. Dropping down upon the snow crust, he 
could do nothing but gasp and groan, not so much from 
sheer exhaustion as in bitterness of heart because he had 
such scanty reserves of strength and endurance. 

‘That’s right; take it easy,” said Larry, whipping the 
short-handled axe from his belt. “This next shift is a 
one-man job.” And as he spoke he attacked first one 
and then another of the stunted trees with the axe and 
hacked them down in a few handy blows. “There are 
the toboggans,” he jerked out; “now for the brakes, 
and in a few minutes more he had two smaller trees down 
and trimmed to bare sticks with stubby branches left at 
the butts and the stubs sharpened to points. 

Purdick sat up, rubbing the calves of his legs. 

“Great Peter!” he exclaimed; “do you mean that we’re 
going to slide down on those trees ?” 

Larry chuckled. 

“You’re one fine little guesser, Purdy; I’ll say that 
much for you. I’ll bet you haven’t had a sled ride since 
you were a little kid, but you’re going to have one now 
—the kind that you’ll talk about after you get old and 
toothless and take your youngest grandchild on your 
knee to tell it what a daring little old rooster you used to 
be in your younger days.” 

“But, for mercy’s sake, Larry!—it’s a mile down to 
that timber, and it looks like ten! When we hit those 
big trees-” 

“I know; you’ll say there won’t be anything left of us. 



42 


-THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


But we’ll have to risk something if we want to beat those 
fellows on the trail. It’s our only chance. And I’m bet¬ 
ting largely upon these brake sticks. You take the stick 
under your arm, so, and lean back hard on it if you find 
yourself going too fast. The sun’s getting a little w^'ork 
in on the crust now, and I’m hoping that these stubby 
branches will cut in deep enough to do the braking act.” 

“I’m still game,” said Purdick, getting up like an old, 
old man and helping Larry to swing the cut-down trees 
into position with the butts pointing down the steep slope. 
And then, as one who knows he has to be slain and wishes 
to have it over with: “Let me go first, and you can come 
along afterwards and gather up the remains.” 

“Nothing like it,” said Larry firmly. “I’ve done this 
thing before, and you haven’t. You watch me go, and 
then do exactly as I do.” And with that, he straddled his 
tree, took the steering stick under his arm and shoved off. 

Little Purdick had held his breath so many times dur¬ 
ing the past twenty-four hours that he did it now quite 
automatically. To his town-bred notion, Larry was sim¬ 
ply committing suicide, or so it seemed as the big bunch 
of evergreen, with Larry riding it, hurled itself down the 
first steep declivity, utterly out of control—it appeared; 
and it was not until the tree and its rider were a mere 
flying dot in the lower distance that Purdick could sum¬ 
mon the nerve to mount his own vehicle and push it off. 

Of what happened to him in the next sixty seconds 
or so he never had a very clear picture. There was no 
working up to speed; no interval in which to grow up 
to the crowding sensations of the thing. With a slithering 
hiss the makeshift sled was off, and at the first downward 
dash the brake stick caught in the crust, ripped a furrow 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


43 


apparently a mile long, and was then torn out of his 
grasp. With nothing to lean on, Purdick whirled over 
on his face and took a death grip on the branches of the 
tree, burying his arms to the shoulders in the foliage. In 
the one brief glimpse he had of the backward rushing 
steep he saw great slabs of the snow crust, torn up by 
the hooking brake stick, following him down in a cata- 
racting procession; the next thing he knew there was a 
crash as if a blast had gone off under him, and Larry 
was stooping over him, laughing and trying to break 
that grim death-hold of the clamping arms. 

^Xet go, you old cockleburr!” he chuckled. “You 
can’t take that tree with you where we’re going. Don’t 
you know that?” 

Purdick sat up and made a valiant effort to get once 
more in touch with things ordinary and commonplace. 

“S-say, Larry,” he whispered, “what was it that blew 
up and stopped me?” 

Larry was laughing again. 

“I guess you were the only thing that blew up. But it 
was that big pine you’re looking at that stopped you. 
You hit it as square as if you were steering for it. Shake 
you up much?” 

“No; I guess I’m all here yet,” said Purdick, rolling 
off his tree sled. “But believe me, Larry, that was some 
ride!” 

“Fifty-eight seconds; I timed you by my wrist watch. 
Did it seem as long as that—or longer?” 

Purdick shook his head. “You can’t prove anything 
by me. After I lost my stick I just shut my eyes and 
came. Whereabouts are we?” 

“Not more than a couple of miles from our camp site 


44 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


and a few hundred feet above the trail—if I’ve kept my 
reckoning. But let’s be on our way. We are ahead of 
those rustlers now, and we want to keep ahead. If we 
move right along, we may not have to do any more 
sprinting.” 

‘‘Here’s hoping,” said little Purdick, stifling a groan 
as he began once more to swing the vegetable-kingdom 
legs. “That run on top of the ridge just about put me 
to sleep from the waist down.” 

“You’ll harden up, after we’ve been out a few days,” 
Larry predicted; and then he set a course diagonally 
through the forest. In a very short time they came to 
the thawing zone, first slushy snow and then mud, and 
springy morass, bad going that slowed them down in 
spite of all the care they could take in picking their way. 
But this, too, was left behind in the course of time, and 
at last they found themselves skirting the canyon on a 
high bench-like plateau thickly carpeted with the fir 
needles and densely shaded by the primeval trees. 

Here, where their hurrying footsteps made no sound, 
they could hear the riffle and splash of the stream in the 
gorge below, and it was Purdick’s quick ear that presently 
detected other noises—namely, the well-remembered clink 
of horseshoes upon stone. 

“Glory!” he exclaimed, closing up swiftly upon his file 
leader, “they’re coming! We lost so much time back 
there in the mud that they’ve overtaken us 1” 

“How about those legs of yours?” said Larry over 
his shoulder. 

“They’ll run—they’ve got to run!” gasped Purdick. 
“Pitch out, and I’ll try to keep you in sight.” 

Luckily, this last race was a short one. A scant quar- 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT, 


45 


ter of a mile farther on they came to the park-like opening 
where their camp had been pitched, and in another minute 
they were sliding down to the little flat where they had 
built their fire and spread the beds of fir tips. 

The lost book was there, lying on the ground at the 
roots of the big tree, just where it had fallen from Pur- 
dick’s hands. If the night raiders had had a light of any 
sort, they could hardly have helped seeing it. But they 
had probably meant to make their attack a surprise, for 
which the moon was then giving sufficient light, and, 
finding the fire out and the camp deserted, had doubtless 
begun the pursuit at once. 

Larry, being about two jumps ahead of Purdick, 
snatched up the book, and whirling quickly with arms out¬ 
spread, swept his slighter companion back into the shelter 
of the wood. 

^‘They’re coming—they’re right here!” he hissed; and 
they had barely time to fling themselves down under a 
low-growing tree when the three men appeared on the 
trail leading from the upper canyon and halted in the 
little intervale. 

From where they lay under the drooping branches of 
the friendly little tree the two boys could see their late 
pursuers quite plainly. The cripple was riding one of 
the horses, with his crutch thrust under the saddle leather. 
The one the cripple had called ‘‘Dowling” was riding the 
other horse, and the third, the biggest of the three, was 
afoot. 

At the halt the cripple barked a command at the one 
who was walking. 

“Take a look at their camp and see if they’ve left any¬ 
thing worth swipin’, Bart,” he said; and the big man 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


46 

lounged up to the wood edge, kicked at the remains of 
the fire, turned the beds over with an investigative foot, 
and even went so far as to stoop and look around under 
the low-spreading branches of the nearer trees. As he 
did this, it was only Larry’s quick wit that saved them 
from certain discovery. With a swift premonition of 
what the man was going to do, he reached up and pulled 
one of the low-hanging branches of the little tree down 
so that its foliage screened them perfectly. But for that, 
the peering robber must have seen them. 

‘‘Nothin’ doin’,” said the man gruffly as he straightened 
up; and a few seconds later the two riders and their foot 
follower had gone on to disappear around a jutting cliff 
in the canyon. 

“Gee, Larry, but that was a close one!” sighed little 
Purdick, after the clinking hoofbeats had died away into 
silence. Then: “I guess I’ll have to have something done 
to my old heart. It makes altogether too much noise 
when there’s anything due to happen. Why, if that big 
thief had been listening half as sharply as he was look¬ 
ing, he could have heard it as plain as a trap-drum 1 What 
do we do next?” 

Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was still only the 
middle of the forenoon. 

“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’ll have to go back 
to the pass by the trail, and the middle of the day is going 
to be the worst time to hit the snow. The wet pack will 
be as slippery as grease, and we’ll be pretty sure to get 
snow-blind with the noon glare. Suppose we go back 
in the woods a piece and bed down and catch up on a 
little of the sleep that we lost last night. How does that 
strike you?” 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


47 


“It strikes me right where I live/’ said Purdick, yawn¬ 
ing in the mere anticipation of a rest halt. “I suppose 
there is no danger of those rascals coming back?” 

“Not the least in the world. What they’ll do if they 
really mean business—as I’m much afraid they do—will 
be to go down to Nophi and outfit the same as we have 
for a trip over the range. It’s perfectly plain that they 
believe they have a sure pointer on the whereabouts of 
the Golden Spider through us, and, as I told Dick, I 
don’t believe we’ve seen the last of them. But that’s a 
future. Let’s hunt us a hole and turn in.” 

The hole-hunting was a short process. A few hundred 
yards above their former camping place they found a 
little dell under the trees where the fallen needles of 
many seasons lay a foot deep. There is no better wilder¬ 
ness bed when the fir needles are dry, and within a very 
few minutes after they had stretched out on the fra¬ 
grant, springy carpet, each with his locked hands under 
his head for a pillow, they were asleep. 

During his year in college, Larry had often said that 
he had an alarm clock in his head, proving the assertion 
by his ability to wake up at any given hour in the night 
merely by fixing that hour in his mind before going to 
sleep. Upon this day-nap occasion in the Lost Canyon 
wood he set the alarm for three o’clock, and, true to his 
boast, it lacked but a few minutes of three when he sat 
up and rubbed his eyes and looked around sleepily to try 
to make out where he was and how he came to be there. 

It all came back in a moment, and he reached over to 
shake Purdick, who was still sleeping like a log. 

“Wake up, Purdy,” he said. “Time to eat a bite o’ 
pie. 


48 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Purdick came up with a snap. “Gee!” he yawned; “I 
sure did cork it orf in me ’ammick that time 1 How long 
have we been at it?” 

“Six hours solid. And Fm as hungry as a wolf. Let’s 
see what you’ve got in that haversack.” 

The eatables were produced and they fell to like fam¬ 
ished savages. Purdick had provided pretty liberally, but 
what with the early breakfast, the hard travelling that 
had followed it, and the lapse of time, they didn’t leave 
much of what Purdick had thought would suffice for at 
least two meals. 

“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Larry, meaning 
the gorging which left only a couple of bacon sandwiches 
for that possible second meal. “We’ll catch up with our 
supplies by late supper-time, at the very worst, and I 
know you’d rather carry your share of the grub under 
your belt than in the haversack.” 

“I sure would,” Purdick admitted. He had never be¬ 
fore known what it was to have such a gorgeous appetite 
as the mountain air was already giving him. “I see 
where we’re never going to be able to stay out all sum¬ 
mer without back-tracking to civilization for more eats 
every few minutes.” 

Larry laughed and sprang afoot. 

“Just now we’re going to back-track to Mule-Ear Pass. 
Feel up to it?” 

“I feel up to anything. As the fellow says in that old 
English stuff that the English Prof, made us take for 
side-reading last winter: Tate can not harm me—I have 
dined.’ Let’s get a move and have it over with.” 

That was a simple way of stating it: “Let’s get a move 
and have it over with,” like swallowing a dose of medi- 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 


49 


cine. But there were a good many wearisome moves to 
be made before they won up to the final ascending loop 
in the snow trail, and they saw now—had been seeing 
ever since they struck the snow path—how impossible it 
would have been to get the burros up the mountain in 

u 

the thawing daytime. 

They had been talking about this, and their good luck 
in being warned beforehand by Mr. Broadwick in Nophi, 
when Larry said: 

'T hope Dick didn’t have any trouble going down on 
the other side. I’ll bet it’s no one-man job to get a 
packed burro out of a drift if it breaks through where 
there’s any depth.” 

“I should say not,” Purdick agreed. ^^But I guess Dick 
made it all right. What I’m wondering is how far he had 
to go before he could pull up and wait for us.” 

‘Tt won’t be long, now, before we’ll find out how far 
he had to go,” said Larry, and they went on toiling up 
the last of the slippery grades. 

By the time they had topped the pass and had their 
first good look over into the mountain wilderness beyond, 
the sun had gone behind the high-lifted crests of the 
Little Hophras. What they saw between the two ranges 
was a roughly tumbled intervale which could hardly be 
called a park because it was so cut up by spurs from the 
surrounding mountains. It was rather a series of parks, 
some wooded and some bare, with a scattering of the 
great rounded hills known from Montana to Arizona as 
buttes. 

To their great comfort they saw that the snow did not 
extend nearly as far down the western slope of their 
range as it did on the eastern; as a matter of fact, they 


50 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

y 

had gone scarcely a mile down the descending trail before 
they were out of the snow belt altogether, and with only 
a narrow zone of the stiffening slush and mud to cross 
before they came to good going again. 

With the snow trail left behind, and no signs on it to 
indicate that Dick had had any trouble negotiating it 
with the burros, they were expecting to overtake him at 
every turn in the descending path. But the expectation 
seemed to be in no hurry to get itself fulfilled. Turn 
after turn was made, and still there was nothing to show 
that Dick had passed that way. 

By this time sunset was fully come, and though there 
was a fine afterglow on the peaks, the dusk was falling 
rapidly in the canyons and valleys. 

“I don’t like this,” said Larry, halting at last in a little 
grassy glade. '‘Dick had no reason to try to make dis¬ 
tance on us. And he wouldn’t go far enough from the 
trail so that he couldn’t watch for us. I wish we had 
one of the guns so we could signal to him.” 

Purdick had crossed to the farther side of the glade 
and was stirring something on the ground with the toe 
of his boot. 

“Somebody’s been here,” he said. “Here are the ashes 
of a fire.” 

Larry joined him quickly and stooped to lay his hand 
on the ashes. 

“They’re cold,” he announced. “But somebody has had 
a fire here within a few hours. If it was Dick, why 

didn’t he stay here? And if it was somebody else-” 

The sentence was broken because he was down on his 
hands and knees looking for tracks in the short-grass 
turf. It didn’t take him long, poor as the fading light 



51 


IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 

t 

was, to find tiny hoofprints in the soft soil. “It was 
Dick’s fire,” he said definitely. “He has been here, and 
he built the fire—and when he went away he didn’t put 
it out.” 

“Well,” queried Purdick, “what does that mean?” 

“It means just one of two things, Purdy: either Dick 
had some reason for leaving in a hurry, or else he was 
made to leave.” 

“How do you know?” 

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. That fire 
went out of itself—burned out; you can see that by the 
ashes. And Dick is too good a woodsman to go off and 
leave his camp-fire burning unless he had a mighty good 
reason for it.” 

Purdick was feeling in the haversack, which contained 
only the mineralogy book and two biscuit sandwiches. 
What he said showed that he was still too much of a 
townsman to suspect that anything serious had happened 
to Dick Maxwell. 

“Gee!” he exclaimed. “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much 
over yonder in the canyon. Dick has vanished with the 
grub, and it’s getting dark, and we’ve got just two sand¬ 
wiches to chew on. I call that pathetic.” 

“Wake up!” said Larry sharply. “We’ve got to find 
Dick, and do it now —not because we haven’t enough grub 
for supper, but because it looks as if Dick is in trouble of 
some sort! Get down here and help me to find out which 
way these burro tracks are pointing. Get busy, quick, 
before the light is entirely gone 1” 




CHAPTER IV 


DADDY LONGBEARD 

W HEN Dick Maxwell was left alone on the summit 
of Mule-Ear Pass, he watched his two companions 
running along the spur ridge as long as he could see them. 
But after they were fairly out of sight he began to get 
ready for the descent of the western trail. 

When he attacked it, he found the downward trail on 
the western slope much less difficult than that over which 
they had gained the pass from the east. So, by the time 
the daily thaw was setting in, Dick had his two-jack train 
well down into the timber and was casting about for a 
good place in which to camp and wait for Larry and 
Purdick. 

Oddly enough, as he thought, the good places were 
slow in revealing themselves. Upon leaving the snow 
slopes and entering the timber, the little-used trail, after 
crossing and recrossing the little torrent in the gulch a 
number of times, seemed to fade out gradually. Being 
only a sort of apprentice pathfinder, Dick didn't notice 
the fading at first. What he was looking for was a bit 
of grass for the burros in a place where Larry and Pur¬ 
dick would have no trouble in finding it, and him, when 
they should come over the mountain. 

It was getting pretty well along toward noon when 
Dick began to wonder if something wasn’t wrong. For 

52 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


53 


one thing, the trail seemed to have disappeared entirely, 
and for another, he suddenly realized that the noise of 
the stream, which he had been holding in the back of his 
mind as a guide, had been gradually growing fainter and 
fainter until now he couldn’t hear it at all. 

Plainly, it was time to call a halt and do a little think¬ 
ing. Though he had been taking it easy, and letting the 
jacks do the same, he knew he must have covered con¬ 
siderable distance in the course of the forenoon. And 
every added mile he was traveling was making it just 
that much harder for Larry and Purdick to overtake and 
find him. Moreover, the little pack beasts couldn’t go on 
forever without feeding. He must find grass, and find it 
soon, or the burros would suffer. 

Having reached that sensible conclusion, he hitched the 
patient little cinimals to a tree, and made a wide circuit in 
search of a patch of grass. Luckily, he soon found one 
in a little open glade, and to this he drove the burros, 
relieved them of the packs, and turned them loose to 
graze. 

Munching his own midday meal while the jacks were 
feeding, Dick did some more thinking. Little by little 
the conviction that he had lost his way grew upon him, 
and the consequences began to loom up. Since he him¬ 
self had packed their haversack, he knew that Larry and 
Purdick had barely enough for two meals. If he and the 
provisions were lost so that the two who had been left 
behind couldn’t find them, they’d go hungry. 

Confronted by this nettlesome fact, Dick ate his own 
dinner hurriedly. The only thing to do was to turn back 
and find out where he had left the trail. But when he 
came to consider this matter of back-tracking, confusion 


54 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


set in. In which direction had he wandered? Was the 
stream he had been following to the left or to the right? 

He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and 
cold bacon when the confusion of ideas climaxed in the 
admission that he didn’t know which side of the stream 
he had crossed to last. There had been a number of the 
crossings, and he hadn’t taken any notice of the particu¬ 
lar direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of 
affairs, but the need for action was none the less pressing. 
Larry and Purdick mustn’t be left to wander all over the 
lot, famine-stricken, just because their provision freighter 
hadn’t had sense enough to stay where he could be found. 

Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for 
the burros to fill up. They were doing their hungry 
best; anybody could see that. Still, it was taking time. 

“Chew—chew fast, you little beggars!” he grumbled 
at them, stretching himself out on a bed of fir needles 
and watching them as they cropped. “We’ve got to be 
making tracks out of this, if you did but know it.” 

Now, when one has lost half a night’s sleep, and, on 
the heels of the loss, has tramped up one side of a moun¬ 
tain and down the other, a bed of dry conifer needles is 
likely to prove a pretty subtle temptation—not to go to 
sleep, of course, with the urgencies making it perfectly 
plain that one really mustn’t do that, but just to close 
one’s eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked 
his hands under his head and lay gazing at the industrious 
burros. He had to look down his nose to see them, and 
that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn’t mean to go to sleep. 
Two or three times he found his eyes closing automatic¬ 
ally; and at last, with the thought that he might just as 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


55 

well doze off for the half-hour that it would take the 
jacks to fill themselves up, he was gone. 

That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm 
clock in the back part of his head that he could set to go 
off promptly at the end of half an hour. Quietly in the 
silence of the little glade, which was broken only by the 
industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the half-hour 
slipped by, and then another and yet another. 

The burros had finished the filling-up process and were 
beginning to sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the 
tree shadows lengthened as the good old earth turned 
over in its daily wallop, and still Dick slept on. When 
he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him 
over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could 
top off with by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell 
and looked at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. He 
had lost over four hours of the day! 

Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so 
heedless as to go to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the 
pack saddles into place, loaded them, and was ready to 
hike. Since all directions looked alike to him, he set 
off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that 
course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the 
upper edge of the timber where at the worst he could get 
a wider look at things than could be had in the forest. 

But he had scarcely got the small procession in mo¬ 
tion before he began to have trouble with the jacks. 
Though they had hitherto gone on amiably enough in 
any direction they happened to be headed, they now 
seemed determined to edge away to the left. Again and 
again Dick pushed and dragged them back into the uphill 
path, but before he could take his place at the tail of the 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


56 

procession they would be crabbing aside and circling— 
always in the same direction. 

*‘Aye—Fishbait; what’s the matter with you?” he 
shouted at the leading burro; and then, all at once, he 
knew. The jacks had had a feed, but no water. And 
now they were smelling water somewhere to the left and 
wanted to go to it. 

“All right, little donks!” he said, laughing at his own 
dullness; “I guess you know what’s what better than I 
do. Find the creek and get your drink, and then we’ll 
follow it back to where the trail begins to show up for 
us again.” 

As it turned out, it was only a short distance, as wil¬ 
derness distances go, to the water the burros had been so 
anxious to reach; but, by the same token, the sun was 
now sinking pretty fast, and Dick saw that he would 
have to hurry if he wanted to get anywhere before the 
early forest dusk should overtake him. Accordingly, as 
soon as the burros had had their drink, he headed them 
up the stream, congratulating himself that the way out 
of the lost tangle had been found so easily. 

Again that was that. But before he had gone very far 
in the new direction that old saying about not laughing 
until you are out of the wood began to suggest itself. 
He tried to tell himself that it was all right; that he had 
found the creek, and if he should follow it up far enough 
it was bound to take him back to the trail. Just the same, 
there was nothing at all familiar in the surroundings, 
and the creek itself looked different. 

Still, there was nothing to do but to push on, and he 
was doing it industriously a full hour later when the day¬ 
light quit on him and he saw that it was no use trying 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


57 


to go much farther. Camping for the night seemed the 
only thing left for him to do, but when he thought of 
stopping he was a good bit worried. There were still no 
signs of the lost trail, and nothing in the least remember- 
able in what he could see of the landscape. 

This was the condition of affairs when, rounding a 
sharp turn in the creek ravine, he saw a light up ahead. 
In the distance it looked as if it might be a fireplace fire 
shining out through the open door of a cabin. A fire and 
a cabin meant at least two mighty welcome things, just 
then: human companionship, and a chance to find out 
where he had wandered to. 

Being Western born and bred, Dick thought he was 
pretty well prepared for anything that might jump up in 
the woods, however strange it might appear at first sight. 
But the man who came to the cabin door at his shouted: 
“Hello, the house!’’ presented a picture that was almost 
startling. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a shock of hair 
as white as snow, and a great white beard that reached 
fully to his waist, Dick could think of nothing to compare 
him to except a picture in the “Arabian Nights”—the 
Old Man of the Sea. But the resemblance to that hor¬ 
rific personage vanished instantly when a voice, as gentle 
as a woman’s, said: 

“Well, hello, stranger! ’Light and come in. Ye’re 
welcome as sunshine. I hain’t seed a livin’ human sence 
the good Lord knows when!” 

Dick didn’t know what he was to alight from, being 
already on his feet, but he did know the customary 
Southern salutation which usually applies to a person on 
horseback. 

“You’re not any gladder than I am,” he laughed. “I 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


58 

guess Pm lost good and plenty. Wait until I can take 
the packs off the burros, and- 

“Shore enough!” said the gentle old voice. “Didn’t 
see that ye had a couple o’ jacks. Reckon my old eyes 
ain’t so good as they used to be.” And he hobbled out 
and helped Dick to get the packs off. 

Once in the cabin and seated before the open fire, Dick 
unburdened himself—^partly. He told how he and his 
companions had come over the pass together and that 
Larry and Purdick had gone back after a book that had 
been overlooked when they broke camp in Lost Canyon. 
But he didn’t say anything about the race with the would- 
be hold-ups. 

The old man was chuckling gravely when the tale was 
finished. 

“So ye rambled round in the woods and got lost, did 
ye? Well, now—ye shore did it right and proper! 
You’re a good ten mile from the Mule-Ear trail, right 
this minute. Been travelin’ away from it ever sence ye 
got down the mount’in, I reckon.” 

Dick jumped as if he had been shot. 

“Good goodness!” he ejaculated. And then: “I’ve got 
to get back to it some way, to-night! Those fellows will 
have a fit if they don’t find me! Besides, they took only 
a snack with them and they won’t have anything to eat. 
I’ve got all the camp duffle and grub! I thought, all the 
time, I was working back toward the trail as I came up 
the creek.” 

“Ye would’ve been, if ye’d hit’the right creek,” said 
the patriarch mildly. “This ain’t Silver Creek—that 
comes down from the pass gulch; it’s a branch that runs 
into Silver about twelve mile west. Reckon ye must’ve 



DADDY LONGBEARD 


59 


crossed over from one to t’other when ye was ramblin’.” 

‘^Sure!” said Dick, astonished and provoked to think 
that he hadn’t had any better sense of direction. ^'But 
you see how it is ? I’ve got to get back, dark or no dark, 
and if you’ll just let me cook a pot of coffee over your 
fire-” 

“Sho, now!” said the old man; “you lemme talk a 
spell. I could p’int ye right, but ye never would find 
your way over to Silver in the dark; ain’t right shore I 
could do it myself. You listen to ol’ Daddy Longbeard: 
you jest camp down with me for the night, and right 
early in the mornin’ I’ll set ye on your way. Them boys 
ye tell about’ll make out to take care o’ theirselves for one 
night, I reckon.” 

Dick hesitated. Now that he had found somebody 
who could direct him, at least in a general way, it seemed 
all the more needful that he should eat and run. But on 
the other hand, the burros had had a long day, counting 
from the start out of Lost Canyon, and they needed the 
night halt—to say nothing of himself. Again, there was 
something almost pathetic in the way the old man pressed 
his invitation. Dick tried to imagine how it would seem 
to him if he hadn’t seen a living human since the good 
Lord knew when. 

“I guess maybe you’re right,” he said at length. “It’s 
more than likely that I’d get lost again in the dark. If 
you’re sure it won’t be any trouble to you to have me 
stay-” 

“Trouble? None such! I’ll shore take it mighty hand¬ 
some if ye’ll stay and lemme see if I’ve forgot how to 
talk to folks. But I reckon ye’re hongry. Set down and 
I’ll give ye what I’ve got, and right welcome.” 




6o 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘'Nothing like that!” said Dick. “We’ll open the packs 
and the supper will be on me. We’re grub-staked for a 
good long time.” 

That was the beginning of a real, old-time, sociable 
evening. Over the supper which was presently cooked, 
Dick told his old entertainer all about the plans for the 
summer outing, what the three were going to look for— 
and hoped they might be able to find. 

“Jest listen!” said the patriarch musingly, after Dick 
had rattled off the names of half a dozen of the rare 
metals, tungsten, molybdenum, vanadium, chromium and 
so on. “All them there minerals that I never even heerd 
the names of. Us old back numbers don’t know nothin’ 
but gold and silver, and maybe copper and lead. The 
world shore do move. How are ye aimin’ to tell these 
here what-you-may-call-’em minerals when you find ’em?” 

At this, Dick gave a little class-room lecture on field 
tests; how one examined a specimen by its lustre, hard¬ 
ness, color, streak and weight, and how a few simple 
blowpipe tests could also be made with no more apparatus 
than any prospector might easily carry with him. 

To all of this the old man listened with a sort of wist¬ 
ful curiosity. Though he had said little about himself, 
Dick knew, of course, that he must be either a miner or a 
prospector; there could be no other reason for his living 
a hermit life in the mountains. From his earliest child¬ 
hood Dick had been hearing stories of men who buried 
themselves in the wilds, digging year after year in some 
prospect shaft or tunnel, and coming out to the towns 
only when the “grub-stake” was exhausted and money 
had to be earned to buy more. The interior of the little 
log cabin had every appearance of age and long occu- 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


6i 


pancy. The rafters were smoke-begrimed and the fire¬ 
place showed the wear and tear of many fires. 

^^Ye shore are tellin’ me a heap o’ things I never 
knowed, son,” said the old man, when Dick paused, ‘^and 
I jest been a-wonderin’. Are ye too nigh wore out to 
take a li’l’ climb up the hill ?” 

‘‘Not at all,” said Dick; then, with his own good- 
natured grin: “Want to show me your mine?” 

“Huh!” said the patriarch; “how’d ye know I got a 
mine?” 

“That’s easy,” Dick laughed. “You wouldn’t be living 
out here alone if you hadn’t.” 

Without another word the old man took down an old- 
fashioned lantern from its peg on the wall and lighted it. 

“I’m allowin’ maybe you might help me some,” he 
said, in the same half-wistful tone. “You’re a sort of a 
minin’ ingineer, ain’t ye?” 

“Nothing like it,” Dick denied, with another laugh. 
“I’ve just finished my first year in college, and I’m not 
taking ‘Mining,’ at that. But my father owns a half¬ 
interest in a gold mine in the Timanyoni, so I’m not ex¬ 
actly a tenderfoot. If I can help you. I’ll be glad to.” 

“Lemme show ye,” said his host, and together they 
left the cabin and, turning aside from the bed of the 
little stream, climbed a rocky steep beside a huge dump 
which looked, even in the starlight, like an enormous 
gray beard hanging from the mountain side. 

At the top of the dump the old man led the way into 
a tunnel, a sizable hole driven, as the lantern light showed, 
into the solid granite. Once they were fairly inside, the 
old man lighted a miner’s candle and put the lantern 
aside. With the better illumination they pushed on into 


62 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


the heart of the mountain. As they went deeper and 
deeper, Dick marveled at the proof of tireless industry 
the tunnel exhibited. It was roomy enough to admit of 
the old man’s walking upright in it, tall as he was, and 
Dick could see that the rock through which it was driven 
was of the hardest. Some two hundred feet back from 
the entrance the drift widened out into an irregular¬ 
shaped cavern, and the old man stopped and waved his 
candle to show the size of the opening. 

^‘Right here’s where I lost the vein—pinched out on 
me slick and clean,” he explained. ‘Tf I hadn’t been 
plum’ shore she was a true fissure, I reckon I might’ve 
quit short off. But I kep’ on till she showed up again, 
away over here,” and he led Dick to a corner of the 
cavern where the tunnel began again, this time pitching 
down as well as on into the mountain. 

Another two hundred feet was covered down the steep- 
ish incline before they came to the end of things, and 
Dick wondered how the old man ever stood it to wheel¬ 
barrow the broken-rock “spoil” up the long grade and 
out to the dump. But nothing is too hard for one who 
has been bitten by the precious-metal bug, and that the 
old hermit had been so bitten was shown by the eager 
enthusiasm with which he passed the candle flame over 
the face of the rock wall in which the tunnel ended, 
making the light follow the crooked course of a thin 
dark-colored seam that extended diagonally up and 
down it. 

“There she is,” he said excitedly. “That’s what I’ve 
been follerin’ for four solid years—talcin’ out the winters 
that I’ve had to work in the smelter to get money for to 
buy the grub-stakes.” 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


63 


Dick wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but the thing 
almost moved him to tears. Here was a man, evidently 
nearing the end of a long life, digging and burrowing in 
the heart of a great mountain year after year, working 
tremendously, as one must to make any headway in solid 
rock, and with only this thin, knife-blade seam of a vein 
to lead him on. 

“Good goodness!” he exclaimed, catching his breath; 
then, forgetting his grammar completely: “Is that all 
the thicker it is ?” 

“Right now it is,” said the old man. “But it’s been a 
heap thicker’n that sometimes; been as much as a half¬ 
inch in two-three places.” 

“But see here!” Dick exploded; “a half-inch of ore 
isn’t anything! Why, good gracious—it would have to 
be all pure gold or silver to pay with that thickness!” 

“Shore; I know,” said the patriarch serenely. “But 
I’m hopin’ she’s a true fissure. I allowed maybe, with 
your book-learnin’, ye could tell me for certain shore if 
she is a true fissure.” 

“I can’t,” said Dick; “but what difference does it make 
whether it is or isn’t a true fissure?” 

“Huh!” said the old man patiently. “Hain’t yer 
schoolin’ teached ye that? Don’t ye know that a true 
fissure alius widens out if ye go down deep enough on it?” 

True enough, Dick did know; not, indeed, the fact as 
the old miner stated it, but the other fact that a great 
many of the older prospectors firmly believed it. But 
he hadn’t the heart to say that modern mining studies 
had proved that the “widening” didn’t always follow as 
a necessity. 

“Black sulphuret of silver—argentite—isn’t it?” he 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


64 

said, digging a bit of the vein matter from the seam 
with the point of his pocket knife. 

“You named her right, son. And she’s all-fired rich, 
what there is of her. Some o’ these days, maybe, one o’ 
the holes I’m drillin’ ’ll bring her down a foot wide, and 
then-” 

Dick, bom and brought up in a region where mines and 
mining were as the daily bread, knew well the picture of 
ease and comfort and luxury the “and then” was bringing 
up in the old man’s mind. Taking the candle, he passed 
it up and down the face of the heading. At no point 
was the vein of argentite much thicker than the back of 
his knife blade. 

“Here’s hoping good and hard that it will widen out 
for you one of these fine mornings,” Dick said; and then 
the old man took the candle and led the way back up 
the incline. 

It was in the cavern-like place where the vein had been 
lost that Dick asked his guide to wait a minute and let 
him look around. The break in the continuity of the 
vein of argentite was evidently caused by what is tech¬ 
nically known as a “fault,” a crack in the earth’s crust 
made by some volcanic upheaval. In many such cracks 
one side or the other has slipped up or down or sidewise, 
and there had apparently been some such a slip here. 

“You had lots of courage to go on digging when you 
struck this ‘fault,’ ” said Dick. “We struck one in our 
mine in the Timanyoni, and it was forty feet thick.” 

“Uh-huh,” said the old man; “a lime-horse. That’s 
what this was.” 

Dick stoop^'d down and picked up a bit of the broken 
rock stuff with which the crack had been filled in some 



DADDY LONGBEARD 65 

later convulsion than that which had opened the gash in 
the earth crust. 

“Doesn’t look quite like a lime-horse,” he commented, 
examining the fragment by the light of the candle. 
“Seems too heavy for any of the calcareous rocks. Ever 
have it assayed?” 

The old man shook his head. “Naw; it ain’t nothin’ 
but rock—fault-fillin’.” 

Dick put the bit of stuff in his pocket, meaning to look 
at it again by the better light of the cabin lamp. And 
with that the matter rested, for the time being. 

When they were back in the cabin the patriarch lighted 
his corn-cob pipe and wanted to hear more about the 
“queer” metals the three young prospectors were going 
to look for. Dick did his best by way of explaining, tell¬ 
ing of the uses of some of the metals—tungsten in electric 
lamps, vanadium as an alloy for steel, carnotite as the 
source of the wonder-working radium. 

The old man chuckled. 

“Reckon ye wouldn’t bother to locate a gold mine ’r 
a silver mine if ye was to find one, would ye?” he said in 
gentle raillery. 

“Oh, yes, we would,” said Dick, laughing. 

“Well, if ye do, don’t go and do like pore old Jim 
Brock did—get yourselves holed in for the winter 
a-workin’ it and starve t’ death.” 

At this mention of Brock, the discoverer—and loser— 
of the Golden Spider, Dick pricked up his ears. 

“Did you know James Brock?” he asked. 

“Shore I did. Him and me was pardners for a couple 
o’ summers.” 

“Then you know about the Golden Spider?” 


66 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


*T know that’s what Jim called his gold strike that he 
made over in the Little Hophras,” was the reply which 
seemed to be made guardedly. 

‘Tt’s a lost mine,” said Dick. “Nobody’s ever been 
able to find it. Did you know that?” 

“I heerd it, last winter, down at Nophi. I reckon 
nobody hain’t looked in the right place.” 

“Where is hhe right place’?” 

Daddy Longbeard shook his head. 

“I’m too old to go skyhootin’ round the mount’ins 
lookin’ for somebody else’s mine, when I got one o’ my 
own,” he said evasively. 

“But could you find the Golden Spider, if you should 
look?” Dick queried eagerly. 

“Maybe,” was the short reply, and there wasn’t another 
word added to it. 

“Did you know that my uncle, Mr. William Starbuck, 
took care of James Brock for the little while he lived, 
and that Brock gave him the mine?” 

“Yep; I heerd that, too.” 

Without knowing at all why it should be so, Dick felt 
that he was treading upon forbidden ground in question¬ 
ing his host about James Brock’s mine, so he stopped 
short, and, just for a diversion, began to examine, by 
the better light of the cabin lamp, the piece of rock picked 
up in the “fault.” In appearance it was a little like a 
fragment of steel-gray limestone, yet it seemed heavier 
than any non-metallic rock. 

“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of 
some kind?” he asked. 

The old miner wagged his beard in denial. 



Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind ? ” 








DADDY LONGBEARD 67 

“There ain’t nothin’ in it,” he replied. “It’s just crack- 
fillin’.” 

Dick went over to where the packs had been placed, 
opened one of them and got out the box containing the 
blowpipe set. 

“Huh!” said the old prospector. “Tote your assayin’ 
outfit right along with ye, do ye?” 

“Oh, no,” Dick qualified; “only a few things to help 
us make field tests. I can’t tell you anything about quan¬ 
tities—values—because it takes a real assay to do that, 
but we can at least find out whether or not there is any 
metal in this stuff, which seems too heavy to be just 
common rock.” 

Getting out the blowpipe, its alcohol-turpentine lamp, 
the small porcelain mortar and pestle, and the little ham¬ 
mer, he proceeded to break a few chips from the speci¬ 
men and grind them in the mortar, with the old pros¬ 
pector looking on curiously while he worked. Adding a 
little borax for a flux, Dick put the tiny sample on the 
block of prepared charcoal, lighted the lamp and began 
to blow. 

In a short time the sample fused to a dark-gray globule 
and the charcoal around it was covered with a white 
coating. Carefully withdrawing the tip of the blowpipe 
so as to make the blast produce the reducing flame, Dick 
saw the white coating disappear, giving a bluish color to 
the flame. Filling his cheeks again, he kept on blowing, 
and, after quite a prolonged heating, the dark-gray 
globule turned to a tiny yellow metallic button, and at 
this Dick put the blowpipe down and blew out the lamp 
flame. 

“What did you do with the stuff that you took out of 


68 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


that TaulP while you were hunting for the lost argentite 
vein?” he asked. 

'‘Wheelbarrered it out and threw it on the dump,” was 
the old man’s answer. 

‘‘Well,” said Dick definitely, “it’s kind of lucky there 
is plenty more of it left in the ‘fault.’ See this little but¬ 
ton that’s left on the charcoal?” 

The old man squinted his eyes and tried to see, but 
the button was ho larger than a very small pinhead. 

“Take the glass,” said Dick, handing him the pocket 
magnifier. 

“Shore! I see it now. What-all is it?” asked the 
squinter. 

“Silver and gold,” said Dick calmly. “That ‘lime- 
horse’ of yours isn’t a lime-horse at all; it’s a vein of 
sylvanite, according to the blowpipe test. Didn’t you see 
that white stuff on the charcoal go off in a blue flame 
when I heated it? That was the tellurium in the ore. 
You’ve struck a telluride mine without knowing it, and 
you’ve probably thrown a small fortune away in the stuff 
that you wheelbarrowed out and threw on the dump. 
But, as I say, there seems to be plenty more of it. Gee! 
You’re a rich man, and you never suspected it!” 

“But—but, how can you tell ?” stammered the old pros¬ 
pector. “That li’l’ speck o’ metal ain’t no bigger than a 
gnat’s ear!” 

“Of course it isn’t,” said Dick “But when you remem¬ 
ber that it came out of a sample that you could hold on 
your thumbnail . . . why, good goodness! the stuff’s 
simply got to be rich in either silver or gold, or both!” 

The old man turned in his home-made chair and sat 
perfectly still for quite a little while, staring intently into 


DADDY LONGBEARD 


69 


the heart of the fire on the rude stone hearth. When he 
spoke again it was to say: “I ain’t heerd ye say nothin’ 
about me goin’ havers with you, son.” 

“Why, no!” said Dick. “Why should I say anything 
like that ?” 

“Most fellers would. They’d go into court and swear 
that they made the discovery. You did make it, ye know. 
I might ’a’ gone on diggin’ in that mount’in till kingdom 
come, without ever payin’ any attention to anything but 
that streak o’ sulphurets.” 

“That’s all right,” Dick hastened to say. “I’m mighty 
glad I happened to think of testing the stuff, and you 
don’t owe me anything at all. Why, good land—I'm 
your guest r 

Slowly the old man heaved himself out of his chair, 
and, crossing the room, he began to arrange Dick^s bed 
in the single built-in bunk. Dick protested at once, say¬ 
ing that he could roll himself in his blankets before the 
fire. But the newly made bonanza king wouldn’t have it 
that way. 

“No,” he said; “the best I’ve got ain’t none too good 
for you, son. Besides, I reckon I don’t want to go to 
bed, nohow. I reckon I got to set up and think a spell 
afore I can ever go to sleep again.” 

Seeing that it would be a real charity to give the old 
man a chance to “set up and think,” Dick made ready to 
turn in. It was not until he was sitting on the edge of 
the bunk to take his lace boots off that the old man fished 
in a grimy cigar-box and brought out a printed map so 
old and worn that it was falling apart in the creases. 
Spreading the map out on Dick’s knees, he pointed to a 


70 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


pencilled circle enclosing a certain area that looked as if 
it were all mountain and canyon. 

‘T let on to you that Jim Brock and me had been pard- 
ners once, son, and so we was. I don’t know where 
Jim’s mine is, but I do know some’eres near where he 
was prospectin’ when he found it. That circle’s maybe 
five mile acrosst it, and I reckon if you was to look close 
enough inside of it, maybe you’d find the Golden Spider. 
Put the map in your pocket. It’s your’n.” 


CHAPTER V 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 

W HEN Larry and Purdick thought they had found 
the place where Dick had stopped and made a fire, 
and had then had some mysterious thing happen to him, 
they soon realized that they couldn’t hope to trail the 
burro hoofprints very far in the growing dusk. But they 
did manage to follow them to the nearest crossing of the 
little stream, and here, where a patch of wash sand made 
the record as plain as a book page, Larry heaved a sigh 
of relief. 

“If we didn’t have such good forgetteries—both of 
us—we needn’t have been scared up so badly, Purdy,” he 
said. “Don’t you remember what Mr. Broadwick told 
us yesterday—about two men coming over here ahead of 
us with supplies for the Little Eagle in Dog Gulch? 
They are the fellows who made the fire and didn’t put 
it out—not Dick.” 

“How can you tell?” asked the town-bred one. 

“You can see for yourself,” Larry returned, pointing 
down at the bed of damp sand. “There were at least four 
burros making those tracks, and Dick has only two. See 
how the hoofprints overlap, again and again?” 

Purdick looked and saw. 

“That’s better; that means that Dick is still somewhere 
on ahead of us.” 


71 


72 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘‘Yes, and we won’t catch up with him before morning. 
We can’t follow this trail in the dark. We’ll just have 
to camp for the night and make the best of it.” 

Since this seemed to be the only sensible thing to do, 
they picked out a place with a big cliff-like boulder for a 
background. Here, after they had lopped some tree 
branches for a bed and built a fire which, reflected from 
the big rock at their backs, promised to supply the warmth 
of the blankets they didn’t have, they ate the two remain¬ 
ing bacon sandwiches. 

^'Not much of a supper,” Larry commented, munching 
his share of the short ration; ‘‘not after the tramp we’ve 
had. But it’s a lot better than none.” 

“If it didn’t sound like trying to be funny. I’d say you 
said a mouthful—both ways from the middle,” said little 
Purdick with a grin. “I was just thinking what a beau¬ 
tiful fix we’ll be in if we don’t happen to find Dick and 
the eats in the morning.” 

“Yes,” said Larry. “We brag a good deal about our 
civilization, and how much we’ve gained on the old cave¬ 
men; but I’ve often wondered what would happen to one 
of us up-to-date folks if he were dropped down in the 
middle of a wilderness like—well, like this, for instance, 
with no tools or weapons and nothing to eat. Would we 
have to go hungry to-morrow if we shouldn’t find Dick?” 

“Golly!” said Purdick, “I’m sure I should. Why, we 
haven’t seen a single eatable thing since we started out 
yesterday noon!” 

“Game, you mean ? I suppose that’s because we weren’t 
looking for it. But there is plenty of game in these 
mountains, just the same; big game, at that. What I’ve 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 


73 

wondered is if the up-to-date man, bare-handed, could 
manage to catch any of it.” 

^‘Not this one,” laughed Purdick. 

“Fish, then?” Larry suggested. “These clear moun¬ 
tain streams are full of trout, you know.” 

“Yea!” Purdick chuckled. “Imagine a fellow catching 
trout with his hands!” 

“Til bet it could be done—if the fellow were hungry 
enough,” Larry maintained. “But Pm not going to sit 
up and argue with you. Pm all set to turn in and sop 
up a little more sleep.” And with that he burrowed in 
the tree-branch bed and turned his back to the fire. 

It was deep in the night that Larry, sleeping the sleep 
of the seven sleepers, felt himself shaken by the shoulder. 

“Wake up!” Purdick was saying, and his teeth were 
chattering. “L-l-look over there—across the creek!” 

Larry raised his head and looked. The camp-fire, 
backed up by a good-sized windfall log they had dragged 
down to it, was burning quite brightly, but its circle of 
light did not reach much beyond the little stream braw¬ 
ling and splashing a few feet away. On the opposite 
side of the stream a thicket of young cedars came down 
close to the water’s edge, and in the heart of the thicket 
two balls of green fire appeared, steady and unflickering. 

“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then: 
“Keep perfectly still until we see what it is.” And, as a 
measure of safety, he reached cautiously for the short- 
handled axe. 

They did not have to wait long. In a moment there 
was a little stir in the thicket and the balls of fire began 
to move slowly. Larry, more wood-wise than his bed- 
mate, knew that what they were seeing were the eyes of 


74 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


some animal that had been attracted by the light of the 
camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should 
happen to be a bear, lean and famished from its winter 
hibernation—as Larry well knew, there were still grizzlies 
to be found in the Hophras . . . But at this point he 
pulled himself together and let good old common sense 
get in its word. The eyes were too high up from the 
ground to be those of a bear, unless the animal were 
standing upon its hind legs, and, besides, they were too 
large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind of a 
bear, even a grizzly. 

While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to 
which the eyes belonged came out of the thicket and 
* advanced cautiously to the water’s edge. It proved to be 
a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily recognizable by 
its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short, black- 
tipped tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a 
few moments, it drank at the stream and then moved 
away, vanishing as silently as it had come. 

‘*Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, ^'are they 
as tame as all that?” 

“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,” 
Larry replied. “The wind was wrong for him. Dick 
and I saw them often last summer in the Tourmaline. 
How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?” 

“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they bur¬ 
rowed again. 

The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when 
they turned out the next morning and Larry regretfully 
dipped water with his hat to extinguish the splendid bed 
of coals that should have figured as their breakfast fire. 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 75 

‘Tt’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he 
said, ^‘but we haven’t anything to cook on it.” 

‘‘How many miles to breakfast ?” Purdick asked. 

“You tell, if you can,” Larry laughed, and they started 
out to follow the trail. 

Fortunately for the empty stomachs, they didn’t have 
to go very far before they saw Dick and the burros com¬ 
ing over a wooded hill to the right. At the “reunion,” 
as Dick called it, they quickly built a fire; and while the 
coffee water was heating and the bacon sizzling in the 
pan, Dick told how he had lost his way and found a 
hermit. 

“We were up before day, and Daddy Longbeard—I 
don’t know any other name for him—came along with 
me far enough to make sure that I wouldn’t get off the 
track again,” he wound up. “When he left me, two or 
three miles back yonder in the woods, he was still acting 
like a man half stunned—over what I told him last night 
about his mine.” 

“Sure you didn’t make any mistake about that ore, are 
you?” Larry inquired. 

“Not a chance! It’s a telluride, all right enough, and 
plenty rich, I should say, from the size of the button I 
got out of one small test sample.” 

“Well, I guess you paid for your night’s lodging, any¬ 
way,” Purdick put in; but Dick Maxwell laughed and 
shook his head. 

“No; it was the other way round; the old man paid 
me for telling him about his bonanza. See here what he 
gave me.” And he showed them the worn map with 
the magic circle on it. 

Of course, this revival of the romantic possibilities 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


^6 

wrapped up in the summer’s outing stirred up some ex¬ 
citement, and the coffee boiled over and threatened to 
put the fire out while they were studying the old map. 
It was Larry who reached up and took hold of things and 
brought them down to the every-day level again. 

“The Golden Spider is all right, fellows, if we should 
happen to run across it, but we all know that there isn’t 
one chance in a million, not even with the help of Daddy 
Longbeard’s circle—which, after all, is only a guess, as 
he said it was. We don’t want to get bitten by the gold 
prospector’s bug and go crazy like so many of ’em do. 
We’re out for good old practical business, and we mustn’t 
forget that Mr. Starbuck is paying the bills. Let’s eat 
breakfast and then hit the grit for the summer work 
field.” 

“Right you are, Larry, old scout!” said Purdick, get¬ 
ting back on his job of frying the breakfast flapjacks. 
“I can begin to see now how easy it is for people to go 
nutty on this gold proposition. Turn to and eat these 
pancakes while they’re hot—they’ll stay with you longer 
that way.” 

By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job 
that morning that set the pace for the next three weeks. 
During that interval they crossed the inter-mountain 
region by easy stages, prospecting in the hills as they 
went, and learning, by actual contact with it, something 
of the wonderful geological structure of the country 
they were traversing. In no part of the United States 
does the earth’s crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings 
and upheavals and apparent contradictions than in the 
mountain regions of western Colorado and eastern Utah, 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 


77 

and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems 
to attack. 

'‘How in the world anybody with no schooling could 
hope to find anything valuable in these rocks and clays is 
beyond me,” said little Purdick, one evening when, by the 
light of the camp-fire, they had been poring over the 
“System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid 
tests to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolfra¬ 
mite, the base which furnishes the metal tungsten. 

“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector 
is like old Daddy Longbeard. He is looking for gold or 
silver, and he is able to identify a few of the commoner 
ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries have 
been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at 
Leadville.” 

“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know. 

“The way Pve heard it was that the man who made 
the discovery was looking for gold-bearing quartz. One 
way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to take a stream that shows 
gold 'colors’ when you pan out the sand in it, following 
this trail of 'colors’ up-stream until you come to a place 
where the 'colors’ don’t show any more, and then you 
prospect in the hills roundabout. 

“This prospector was working up one of the streams 
east of Mount Massive, and he noticed that when he 
washed for gold 'colors’ there were leavings in his pan; 
a black sand that was too heavy to wash over with the 
common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curi¬ 
osity, he saved some of this sand and threw it into his 
specimen sack along with some quartz samples he had; 
did that and then forgot it. Afterward, when he took 
his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumped 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


78 

the sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and 
all, and the assayer was thorough enough to test the sand 
as well as the quartz. And that^s what made the city 
of Leadville.” 

“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold- 
and-silver-bearing ^ites* in this book than anybody could 
ever learn to know by sight unless he crammed for 
them 

“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Long- 
beard, digging for goodness only knows how long in rich 
gold ore without ever so much as suspecting it.” 

Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting, 
but unimportant,” he put in. “The fact remains that 
we’ve been out three weeks and haven’t yet found any¬ 
thing worth staking a claim on.” 

Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned 
luxuriously. 

“But the other fact remains that we’re having one bully 
good time. Purdy, you old rat, you’re actually putting 
some flesh on your bones. And I’ll bet a hen worth 
fifteen cents that not an ounce of it is fat—nothing but 
good old hard, stringy muscle.” 

Purdick drew a long breath. “It’s the greatest thing 
that ever happened to me,” he said. “The hardest thing 
I’m going to have to learn when we go back to the towns 
is how to sleep under a roof again. But speaking of 
finding things : I picked up a queer-looking piece of stuff 
down there by the creek where I went to get a drink this 
afternoon. I forgot to show it to you,” and he took the 
specimen from his pocket and passed it around. 

Looked at through the magnifier, or even without the 
glass, the specimen was a very beautiful thing. It looked 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 


79 


like a sliver of limestone, one side of which wSS covered 
with a thick incrustation of fine little red crystals, six- 
sided prisms glowing with a peculiar lustre that was 
neither garnet nor ruby, but a shade between. Since 
they were out to test every unfamiliar substance they 
came across, the blowpipe was put into service once more, 
and Dick blew until his cheeks ached. 

Heated in the original mass there was nothing doing, 
so they powdered a few of the crystals in the porcelain 
mortar, mixed the powder with borax and salt of phos¬ 
phorus, and tried it again. In the oxidizing flame—the 
hottest flame that can be produced with the blowpipe—a 
clear glass bead, dark yellow in the heat, was quickly 
formed, and this bead, when cooled, turned to a light 
yellow color. 

Larry was turning the leaves of the mineralogy book 
and running a finger over the subject heads. 

‘T was reading about something that did that way, 
just the other day,’^ he said, “but I can’t remember what 
it was. By jing!—what the dickens was it? Something 
that’s dark yellow, hot, and light yellow when it cools. 
Shucks! If I didn’t have such a good forgettery-” 

Purdick had been watching the experiment narrowly. 
“Try it in the reducing flame, Dick,” he suggested. 

Dick did it. With the tip of the blowpipe withdrawn 
just outside of the candle flame he held the yellow glass 
bead inside of the tip of the inner cone of combustion 
that is intensified by this manner of blowing. Almost at 
once the bead turned a brownish color, and Dick carefully 
withdrew it to see what the cooling reaction would be. 
The change which took place was marvelous and very 



8o 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


beautiful. As it lost its heat the little bead turned to a 
brilliant chrome green. 

‘T’ve got it!” snapped Purdick. ''Larry, look in the 
index for vanadinite!” 

Larry searched, found, turned to the proper page. 

"It says that vanadates, in the absence of other colored 
metallic compounds, may be detected by their reaction 
with borax and salt of phosphorus before the blowpipe— 
and goes on to describe just what weVe been looking at.” 

"Hooray!” Dick applauded, "a vanadium mine 1 This 
begins to look like business. Think you could find the 
place again, Purdy?” 

"Pm sure I can,” was the ready answer. "It’s about 
a mile back over our trail of to-day. You remember 
when we were coming along on that little mesa bench 
above the creek, and I scrambled down the slope to get 
a drink and joined you again about a quarter of a mile 
farther along? Well, that was the place—right along 
the creek.” 

"We’ll go back there to-morrow morning, shan’t we, 
Larry?” Dick asked. "If this stuff is there in any work-, 
able quantity we ought at least to stake off a claim. 
What’s vanadium worth as an alloy for tool steel and 
such ?” 

Larry took a well-thumbed little note-book from the 
pocket of his shirt and consulted it. 

"Don’t know what it’s worth now; but a while back, 
ferrovanadium, carrying thirty-five to fifty per cent, of 
vanadium, ran from two dollars and a half to five and a 
half a pound—some valuable little metal. I’ll say!” 

"It sure is!” exclaimed Purdick, with his eyes widen¬ 
ing. "If we can only find enough of it to make it worth 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 


8i 


while. ... I wish Fd had sense enough to look around 
a little when I found that bit. But I didn’t.” 

‘‘Never mind; there’s another day coming,” said 
Larry, “or if there isn’t, all the vanadium in the world 
won’t make any difference to us or to anybody,” and he 
began to fix the fire for the night and to unroll the blan¬ 
kets, while Dick put the testing apparatus away in its 
leather carrying case. 

Their camping place for that night was in a small 
pocket gulch rimming in a little flat watered by a trickling 
rill that dripped over a low cliff at the back of the pocket. 
The flat afforded good grazing for the pack animals, 
there was wood on the rocky slopes for the fire, and red- 
fir tips for the beds. 

In the morning, while Purdick was getting breakfast, 
Larry and Dick prepared the notices to post on the vana¬ 
dium claim, leaving blanks in which to write in the boun¬ 
daries and landmarks when they should determine what 
they were. As Larry was sharpening the stakes to be 
driven to mark the claim, Dick called attention to the 
narrow entrance to the pocket gulch, and said, “Say, 
Larry; what’s the matter with cutting one of those lodge- 
pole pines out of that clump up there and letting it fall 
across this doorway? That’ll make a corral out of the 
gulch, and we can leave the burros and the camp dunnage 
when we go back to stake off the claim. Everything will 
be perfectly safe here.” 

Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick 
said was quite true. With a tree felled across the gulch 
entrance for a barrier, the burros wouldn’t stray, though 
of that there was little danger anyway, so long as there 
were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety of 


82 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


the camp dunnage there was even less question. With 
the exception of a few abandoned prospect holes, the 
inter-mountain wilderness in which they had been tramp¬ 
ing and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of 
human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated. 
The first of the unwritten laws of the camper in any 
region is never to separate himself very far from his 
supplies and his means of transportation. 

“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too 
cautious, but-” 

‘Tshaw!” Dick broke in, ‘^everything will be as safe 
as a clock! We haven’t seen a sign of a human being 
for three weeks, and I’ll bet there isn’t one within forty 
miles of us this very minute. If we fix it so the jacks 
can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen. Be¬ 
sides, we may want to stay down there at that place of 
Purdy’s projecting around for a good part of the day, 
and if we do, we’ll have our camp ready to come back to 
without having to make it again.” 

Larry laughed. 

“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie; 
that’s all that is the matter with you,” he said; but he 
didn’t offer any more objections to Dick’s plan, and 
after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the gulch 
entrance, and the three of them started back for the 
vanadium prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save 
that they were woodsmen enough to put out the camp¬ 
fire, and thoughtful enough to wrap up the rifles and 
the dunnage and put the packs on top of a flat boulder 
where the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their graz¬ 
ing ramblings. Foj the day’s work they carried only a 



FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 83 

pick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer and the short- 
handled axe. 

Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved 
to be a good bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot 
where he had picked up the bit of vanadinite. Worse 
than that, after they reached the approximate place he 
found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had 
found the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and 
there was a stretch of a quarter of a mile or so along the 
creek edge where one place looked very much like an¬ 
other. 

So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat 
the noon snack they had brought with them, they were 
still looking for the deposit of which the specimen was 
a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was 
so hard to find. 

“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the 
town-bred one. “Are you right sure it was yesterday, 
and not the day before, when you picked up that piece of 
stuff ?” 

“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it 
was right along here, too. If I’d had any idea it was 
ore-” He stopped short and made a dive for some¬ 

thing lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out trium¬ 
phantly, “here’s another piece of it, right now!” 

There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crys¬ 
tals in the world more beautiful than those of the lead 
vanadates, and once seen, they are not easily forgotten. 
The newly found fragment was evidently a chip off the 
same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the 
snack, they renewed their search for the “mother vein.” 

After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate. 



THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


84 

now that they knew where to look for it. Of course, 
they had no means of ascertaining the extent of the 
deposit or its commercial value, if it had any, in a place 
so remote from civilization. None the less, they staked 
it off accurately, located it as well as they could on the 
Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully 
tracing their wandering course from day to day, and 
posted the notice, protecting it as well as they could by 
digging a niche in the shaley cliff and pegging the notice 
at the back of it where it would be at least a little shel¬ 
tered from the weather. 

All this business of stepping off and measuring, and 
finding landmarks, and making a sketch of the mesa and 
creek bottom, and searching carefully over the surround¬ 
ing area for other possible deposits of the mineral, took 
most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry 
was pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day 
wasted. 

‘T did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals 
last week while we were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,^^ he 
said, '"and from what I could learn, the reduction pro¬ 
cesses—getting the metal out of the ore—is the long end 
of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest. 
So, unless your mine is big enough to warrant the build- 
mg of a reduction plant on the spot—and not many of 
them are—you’re up against the proposition of trans¬ 
porting a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and 
out of the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the 
metal.” 

‘Well,” said Dick, “what of that?” 

“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your 
vanadium is worth five dollars and a half a pound—> 


FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 


85 

which is the highest price I found quoted. We’re at least 
forty miles from the nearest railroad, which means forty 
miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would 
five dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much, 
go toward paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of 
stuff over forty miles of no-trail-at-all ?” 

“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing 
cold water, you can beat a hydraulic mining outfit 1 Let’s 
go back to camp and cook us a real supper. Fm hungry 
enough to eat a piece of boiled dog. We can come back 
to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep ‘dis¬ 
covery’ hole that we’ll have to make before we can record 
the claim.” 

The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even 
longer now than it had in the morning. In the search 
for the vanadium deposit they had done a good deal of 
scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement of the 
search had kept them from realizing how much ground 
they were covering. 

“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast 
after I turn in to-night,” Dick was saying as they ap¬ 
proached the entrance to the pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t 
lug this pick another mile if it was the only one in the 
world. But see here! What’s been happening?” 

They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled 
to block the entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked 
as if somebody had driven an army truck over it. Its 
branches were broken down and twisted off, and the 
trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious 
truck wheels had been shod with spurs. 

Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much vio¬ 
lence, they forgot their weariness and hurried on into 


86 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


the gulch. What they found when they reached the 
camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The 
packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock 
where they had left them in the morning and were liter¬ 
ally torn to pieces, with their contents scattered all over 
the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was scattered. 

For when they came to look, they found that many 
things were missing. The entire stock of bacon was 
gone, the flour and meal sacks had been torn open and 
their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground, the 
few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against 
a bread emergency had been broken open and rifled, the 
salt lay in the ashes of the camp-fire, the sugar was gone, 
and the cotton sack in which it had been carried looked 
as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in short, 
all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that 
were in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed. 

‘‘Well!—of all the blithering earthquakes I” Dick 
gasped. “Who or what under the sun would do a thing 
like this to us?” 

Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he 
seemed to be holding his breath. Deep down inside of 
him the Donovan temper, a wild. Berserk rage that had 
given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was strug¬ 
gling to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still 
able to talk. 

“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The 
burros are gone!” 


CHAPTER VI 


SHORT RATIONS 

A fter the first burst of wrathful astoundment at 
finding their camp wrecked and looted, the three 
victims of whatever fury it was that had visited the 
gorge in their absence began to count up their losses. 

It was the food losses, of course, that were the most 
serious. Purdick, in his capacity of camp cook, knelt to 
gather up what he could of the scattered flour and corn 
meal, but there wasn’t very much of either that could be 
salvaged. While Purdick was trying to save some of 
the eatables, Larry and Dick reassembled the scattered 
dunnage and camp equipment, endeavoring to make some 
estimate of the length and breadth of the disaster. 

“Just see here!” said Dick, picking up the mineralogy 
book which was lying open and face down at some dis¬ 
tance from the general wreck, with a lot of the leaves 
partly torn out. “What would anybody but a maniac 
want to treat a book like that for?” 

Larry was overhauling the blankets and pack wrap¬ 
pings. 

“You can search me,” he gritted. “I can’t tell you 
that—any more than I can tell you why these blankets 
are all cut and slashed in holes. It must have been either 
a maniac or a devil!” 

“A mighty hungry devil,” Purdick put in. “There 

87 


88 


t 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


isn’t a smell of the bacon left, and we’re shy on every¬ 
thing but the canned stuff.” 

‘T can’t imagine a man, or any bunch of men, mean 
enough to treat us this way!” Dick raged. “Why, it’s 
simply savage 1” 

By this time Larry had got the Berserk Donovan tem¬ 
per measurably in hand again. 

“Gather up, fellows, and let’s see where we land,” he 
said shortly. “The milk’s spilt and there’s no use crying 
over it. How about the eats, Purdy; what have we got 
left?” 

Purdick checked the commissary remains off on his 
fingers. 

“A few cans of tomatoes and peaches and pressed 
potato chips, the can of coffee, enough of the flour and 
meal to make us two or three eatings of pan-bread, and 
one can of corned beef. That’s about all: and there’s 
no salt and no sugar.” 

“Suffering cats!” Dick exclaimed. “And we’re at 
least forty miles from anywhere! Good land, Larry; 
don’t you suppose we could trail these robbers when it 
comes daylight again and fight it out with them?” 

Larry was examining the leather carrying case in 
which the simple testing apparatus, the blowpipe, char¬ 
coal, and the few chemicals were packed. The case had 
not been broken open, but the stout leather was scratched 
and gashed as if some one had tried to cut into it with a 
dull knife. 

“You say Tobbers,’ Dick,” he said thoughtfully. “I 
guess there was only one robber. Look at these cuts on 
this case. What kind of a knife do you suppose it was 
that made them?” 


SHORT RATIONS 


89 


He passed the leather case over to his two compan¬ 
ions. The' deep scars were roughly parallel and five in 
number. Dick was the first to understand. “A bear!” he 
gasped, “and a whopper, at that!” 

Larry nodded. 

“I never heard of a grizzly being this far south. I’ve 
always understood that there were only a few of them 
left in the United States, and that those were away up 
around Yellowstone Park. But I’ll bet the robber was 
a grizzly, just the same. Look at the width of that paw 1” 

“And look at the eats that are gone—only you can’t 
look at them,” Purdick chimed in. “He must have been 
empty clear down to his toes to get away with all that 
stuff. Do they eat everything they can chew?” 

“Mighty nearly everything—if it was a grizzly,” Dick 
offered. 

Purdick’s eyes widened. “I’m wondering now if he’s 
eaten our burros,” he said. 

“Not quite that bad, I guess,” Larry qualified. “He 
was probably too busy with our stuff here to pay any 
attention to the jacks. It’s most likely they got scared 
and bolted. They could get out, easily enough, over that 
broken pine.” 

“In that case, our first job is to go and round ’em up, 
while there’s daylight enough to track ’em,” Dick sug¬ 
gested. “Let’s take the guns, this time. It’s gnawing at 
my bones that we might just happen to run across Old 
Ephraim, and I wouldn’t mind trying to even things up 
a bit with the old scoundrel.” 

“Sure, we’ll take the guns,” Larry agreed. “Where¬ 
abouts are they?” 

That was a question which apparently didn’t mean to 


90 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


get itself answered—not in any hurry, at least. The 
guns had been wrapped in the packs; they were all three 
sure of that. But now they were nowhere to be found; 
and since one discovery leads to others of a like nature, 
they were not long in finding out that the cartridge belts 
had disappeared with the rifles. 

‘^That looks pretty bad,” said Larry, after they had 
searched all around the flat boulder upon which the packs 
had been left in the morning. ‘‘A bear wouldn’t steal 
three Winchesters and all the ammunition we had.” 

‘What’s the answer?” Dick demanded anxiously. 

“Sort it out for yourself,” said Larry. “The bear 
couldn’t have taken them—that’s all.” 

“But if some man or men were here, why wasn’t some¬ 
thing else taken?” 

“Perhaps the man—or men—didn’t think there was 
anything else left worth carrying off,” Larry said; and 
then he repeated: “It looks pretty bad, fellows; looks as 
if somebody wanted to disarm us.” 

Purdick’s jaw dropped. 

“There’s only one bunch that might want to make sure 
we couldn’t fight back—those three hold-ups,” he thrust 
in. “Do you suppose they’ve followed us away in here?” 

“We can suppose anything we like,” Larry answered. 
“There’s sure room enough. But let’s see if we can find 
those jacks. That’s the first thing to do. I only hope the 
gun-stealers haven’t run them off—stolen them, too.” 

In the absence of any real weapons the three armed 
themselves as they could, Larry taking the axe, Purdick 
the geologist’s hammer, and Dick, knocking the pick from 
its handle, took the handle for a club. Just beyond the 
felled pine they picked up the burros’ tracks, and were 


SHORT RATIONS 


91 


somewhat relieved when they found, from the distance 
between the hoof prints showing the length of the stride, 
that the little animals had left the gulch on a ‘Mead’^ 
run. 

^Tt was a bear-scared runaway, and not a man-steal,’’ 
Larry announced confidently, when they had measured 
the length of the strides, “and if that guess is right, we’ll 
find them before long. They wouldn’t run very far. 
That’s one good thing about a jack; he isn’t a panicky 
beast, whatever else he may be.” 

This comforting conclusion had its fulfilment before 
they had followed the burro tracks very far up the valley 
of which their camp gulch was an offshoot. The two 
burros were found quietly grazing in a little patch of 
short-grass, and when they were herded, it was no trouble 
to drive them back, though they did exhibit some signs 
of alarm when they were urged over the broken tree and 
into the small gulch. 

“I guess the bear scent is still here—for them,” Dick 
suggested. “I shouldn’t wonder if we had to hobble them 
to keep them in here overnight.” 

Back at the scene of the wreck, they made a fire, and 
little Purdick prepared to do what he could toward get¬ 
ting a supper out of the remnants. It turned out to be 
a Bamiecidal feast—if that means that it lacked the chief 
essential of a camp meal—which is quantity. Though 
they were all as hungry as they had a right to be after 
the day of hard tramping and searching, they ate spar¬ 
ingly, knowing that they were likely to be hungrier still 
before they could hope to reach any base of supplies. 

It was a pretty silent meal, taking it all around. In a 
single day their plans for the remainder of the summer 


92 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


had been knocked into a cocked hat, so to speak. As 
they had prefigured things, they had meant to work around 
to the small mining-camp of Shotgun in the southern 
Hophras by the latter third of July; to renew their sup¬ 
plies there; and to spend the remainder of the vacation in 
exploring the eastern hogbacks and slopes of the Little 
Hophras. But that was impossible now. 

‘'Shotgun’s at least sixty miles from here,” Larry said, 
measuring the distance on the Government map which 
he had spread out on one of the slashed blankets, “and we 
can hardly hope to make any such hike as that on what 
little grub we have left.” 

“No,” Dick assented promptly. “But what else can 
we do?” 

Larry was tracing a line straight to the west from their 
assumed position on the map. 

“It is less than thirty-five miles from here to Natrolia 
on the railroad—in a direct line,” he said. 

“Yes; but Natrolia—and the railroad—are on the 
other side of the range!” Dick protested. 

“Well,” Larry offered; “it’s six of one and a half- 
dozen of the other; sixty-odd miles over and among 
these little mountains—with no trail to follow, or half 
that distance over one big mountain—also with no trail 
that we know anything about.” 

“I’m as green as grass, now that you’ve got me away 
from the streets and sidewalks,” Purdick put in, “but I 
should say it’s a question of the time either hike will take. 
How about that? We’ve grub enough, such as it is, for 
a couple of days, or maybe three, if we go on short com¬ 
mons.” 

“It’s a guess, either way,” Larry admitted. “We’ve 


SHORT RATIONS 


93 

been dawdling along so that we don’t really know what 
we could make on a sure-enough forced march.” 

“What is the best day’s distance we have covered, this 
far?” It was Purdick who wanted to know, and Dick 
answered him. 

“Not over seventeen or eighteen miles, at the most, I 
should say.” 

Purdick nodded. “Say we can make twenty, by push¬ 
ing the jacks a bit, and keep it up for three days. That 
would take us to this Shotgun place, or within a few 
hours’ march of it. Let me look over these canned rem¬ 
nants again,” and he suited the action to the word. 

“Well?” queried Larry, when Purdick had made his 
estimate. 

“Bad medicine,” was the verdict. “There’s enough of 
the stuff to go round if we spread it thin, but we can’t 
march very hard on tomatoes and peaches and dried po¬ 
tato chips. There’s one little can of corned beef, but 
that will give us only a taste apiece for one meal. And 
as to the flour and corn-meal, you can see where we stand 
when I tell you that I used half of what I could scrape 
up for our suppers to-night.” 

Larry was shaking his head again. “I’m afraid it’s 
the short cut over the mountain for ours. It’s just as 
you say, Purdy; we can’t march very far on half-rations. 
Let’s see what we can get out of this Survey map for 
information about routes and altitudes.” 

For some little time they pored studiously over the 
excellent map. There were no trails marked in the direc¬ 
tion in wLich they would be forced to go to reach Natro- 
lia, and no passes in the range named as such. All they 
could do was to go by the altitude contour lines, and the 


94 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


lowest marking they could find that was anywhere near 
in the direct line was something over 9,000 feet. Since 
the altitude of their camp was about 6,000 feet, that 
meant a climb of more than 3,000 feet straight up through 
a trackless wilderness, and a descent of the same or a 
greater distance on the other side of the range. 

“Looks pretty tough, fellows,” said Dick, after they 
had made the map tell them all it could, “but I guess we’re 
in for it. I vote for Natrolia.” 

“I guess I do, too,” Larry agreed, though not with any 
great amount of enthusiasm. 

Little Purdick grinned. “I’m in the hands of my 
friends,” he said. “If you two say we’ve got to climb 
the ladder. I’m with you as long as I last.” And then, 
as they were preparing to turn in early so as to get an 
early start: “Any danger of that grizzly coming back in 
the night, do you reckon?” 

Larry laughed. “I guess not; not if he’s eaten all you 
say he has. If he comes, we’ll do like the darkey did 
with the mule—twis’ his tail. You can roll in between 
Dick and me, Purdy. That’ll give him something to 
chew on before he gets to you.” 

It was after they had made up the fire for the night, 
and were burrowing in the torn blankets, that Purdick 
said: “Seems to me we’re dismissing this business of 
the hold-ups a lot too easily. If those fellows are going 
to follow us around all summer, we’ll never know what 
minute is going to be the next. Now that they’ve got 
our war stuff, what’s to prevent them from dropping 
down on us any old time and taking the maps away from 
us?” 

“Just one little thing,” Larry answered. “If they 


SHORT RATIONS 


95 


think we know where the Golden Spider is—and if you 
heard their talk straight that night in Lost Canyon, 
that’s what they do think—they’ll wait and let us find it 
for them. They’ve taken the guns to make sure that we 
can’t put up a fight when the time comes.” 

‘‘Huh!” said Dick; “if they’ve been following us for 
three weeks and haven’t yet found out that we’re not 
looking for any Golden Spider, they haven’t much sense; 
I’ll say that much for them.” 

“Do you suppose they came here before the bear had 
torn us up, or afterward?” Purdick asked. 

“That is something we’ll probably never know. Better 
forget it and go by-by. If we haven’t a hard day ahead 
of us to-morrow, I’ll miss my guess. Good-night.” This 
from Larry, and he set the good example by turning 
over and going to sleep. 

When they roused up at daybreak the next morning 
they found that the weather, which during the three 
weeks of tramping and camping had been as perfect as 
mountain summer weather can be, had changed remark¬ 
ably during the night. The sky was overcast, and among 
the higher peaks of the Little Hophras a storm was 
raging. 

“More bad medicine,” said Larry, struggling out of 
his blankets to liven up the camp-fire. “If that storm 
moves a little farther south, we’re likely to run square 
into it as we climb. Plustle us a bite to eat, Purdy, and 
Dick and I will saddle the jacks. We can’t get too sud¬ 
den a start.” 

The breakfast, what little there was of it, was eaten 
hurriedly; and with the faint echoes of the distant thun¬ 
der coming down to them like the almost inaudible beat- 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


96 

ing of a great drum, they made their way out of the 
camp gulch, setting a course due west by Dick’s pocket 
compass, and beginning the forced march. 

For an hour or so it was not so difficult. Though they 
had thought that the scattered buttes among which they 
had been prospecting for the past few days were the foot¬ 
hills of the Little Hophras, they soon found that they 
were not, and the forenoon was half gone before they 
reached the true foot-hills and began the actual ascent 
of the range. 

During this interval the storm, or a series of storms, 
had continued to rage among the higher steeps, and they 
knew, in reason, that much water must be falling on 
those lofty slopes. Of this they soon began to have dis¬ 
maying proof in the rapid rising of the streams they had 
to cross from time to time; and one creek in particular— 
the one through whose canyon-like gorge they hoped to 
find a path to the upper heights—was running like a mill- 
race. At the mouth of the canyon, Larry called a halt. 

‘T don’t know about tackling this thing with all the 
water that is coming down through that slit, fellows,” 
he said doubtfully. “If it rises much higher it’ll fill the 
canyon from wall to wall.” 

“Oh, we can make it, all right,” said Dick, always the 
venturesome one of the three. “It’ll be a cold day if we 
can’t find room for our feet and two toy-sized jacks. 
Heave ahead.” 

Now a canyon, as everybody knows, is at first a sheer 
chasm worn down through the rock by the stream for 
which it is the outlet. But in most canyons age-long 
erosion and the action of frost have thrown down more 
or less detritus from the walls to form a sort of dump 


SHORT RATIONS 


97 


or talus on one or both sides of the waterway, so, when 
the stream is low enough, the canyon becomes navigable, 
so to speak, for a man afoot or for a sure-footed pack 
animal. 

The small canyon which the three were now entering 
was no exception to the rule. At the entrance the talus 
on the right-hand bank of the stream was broad enough 
to have afforded room for a wagon road, and it so con¬ 
tinued as far up the gorge as they could see from the 
portal. The danger, if there were any, could only come 
through a tumble into the stream which, though not as 
yet so very deep, roared and thundered among the boul¬ 
ders in its bed in a muddy torrent that would have made 
short work of man or beast if either were unlucky enough 
to fall into its clutches. 

For a half-mile or so they stumbled on in single file 
over the sloping talus, which still stayed on their own 
side of the torrent, and still afforded a footway, precari¬ 
ous enough, in all conscience, but nevertheless practic¬ 
able. It was at the third turn in the crooked pathway 
that Larry, who had been studiously watching the stream 
as they went along, stuck in another word of caution, 
shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the 
flood. 

*The water’s rising every minute!” he exclaimed. “It 
must be raining cats and dogs up there on the higher 
levels. If a little cloudburst should happen along right 
now, we’d be trapped like so many gophers in a hole.” 

“It sure does begin to look that way,” Dick called back. 
“Let’s push on faster and see if we can’t find a place to 
hang up until the creek begins to fall a bit. It can’t rain 
up yonder forever.” 


98 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Accordingly, they tried the pushing expedient, and kept 
it up until they came within a hair’s breadth of losing one 
of the jacks. The little animal—it happened to be the 
rearmost one of the two—stepped on a loose stone, slipped, 
scrambled frantically to regain its footing, and ended by 
falling heavily on its side with its feet fairly in the rising 
torrent. Dick, who was next in the Indian-file proces¬ 
sion, ^'motivated” instantly, as a psychologist would say. 
With a quick leap he sprang upon the fallen burro’s head 
and got a death grip on its hackamore leading halter. 
Larry and Purdick closed in quickly, and a three-man 
lift got the laden animal upon its feet again. But it 
was a close call. 

‘‘That settles it,” Larry commented, after the little ad¬ 
venture had been made to end without disaster. “We 
can’t hurry the jacks in such going as this. If we do 
we’ll lose both of ’em.” 

“I guess you’re right,” Dick conceded; “as right as 
the rain that’s bringing this creek up so fast.” And 
thereupon they began to feel their way more circum¬ 
spectly. 

But care isn’t the only thing that is necessary in taking 
a hazard; a little foresight is sometimes a lot more need¬ 
ful. It was unquestionable now that the torrent was 
mounting fast; getting bigger by leaps and bounds. And 
as it rose, the talus pathway grew narrower and nar¬ 
rower, until at last the Indian-file procession was squeez¬ 
ing itself flat against the right-hand rock wall to keep 
out of the water. When this came about, even Dick 
began to lose his nerve. 

“We’d better turn back and get out of this!” he called 
over his shoulder to Larry, who was bringing up the 


SHORT RATIONS 


99 

rear. ‘We’ll never get past that next shoulder—never in 
this world!” 

It did look dubious—more than dubious. Just ahead 
of them the canyon made a sharp elbow turn around a 
jutting cliff, and the stream, forced almost to reverse 
itself in the acute angle, was tearing the talus away in 
huge mouthfuls as it surged back from its plunge against 
the opposite cliff. As they stopped to look ahead, it 
became evident that in a very few minutes there wouldn’t 
be any talus left. But when they looked the other way, 
down the perilous path over which they had just come, 
they saw at once that their retreat was wholly cut off. In 
one place behind them the shelving slope had been entirely 
washed away and there was no footing left. 

“We’ve got to make that turn ahead!” Larry yelled, 
and, squeezing himself past Dick, Purdick and the trem¬ 
bling jacks, he took the lead, dragging manfully at Fish- 
bait’s halter, and shouting at the others to come on. 

It was touch and go. As they approached the elbow 
turn the loose-piled, rocky debris under foot seemed to 
be dissolving into soft mush, and little Purdick, who was 
now at the tail end of things, went in almost to the tops 
of his lace boots. To make matters worse, the air was 
suddenly filled with a hoarse, murmuring roar that was 
deeper and more terrifying than the thunder of the aug¬ 
mented torrent. Purdick didn’t know what it was, but 
the other two did. Dick dropped back and pushed Pur¬ 
dick into the second place. 

“Keep going!” he panted. “There’s a cloud-burst flood 
coming down the canyon, and if we can’t turn that corner 
and find standing room beyond it, we’re goners!” 

Fortunately—how fortunately they were soon to real- 


lOO 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


ize—the corner was turned successfully, and on the upper 
side of the jutting cliff there was not only safer footing: 
there was a small side gulch coming down steeply into 
the main canyon. Up this gulch to higher ground they 
urged the stumbling burros, and even as they did it, the 
murmuring roar grew louder and the solid earth seemed 
to be trembling under their feet. 

Shouting, pulling, hauling and working like maniacs, 
they pushed and dragged the two pack animals up to the 
very head of the little side gulch, and they barely had 
done it when a wall of water, mountain high, it seemed 
to them, and black with debris and forest wreckage, came 
sweeping down the main gorge, rolling great boulders, 
hogshead size, before it as if they were pebbles. And 
with the terrifying flood, as if borne on its crest, came a 
dank wind that sucked up into the small side gulch as it 
passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves to 
hold the burros—and their own footing—like the breath 
from an ice cavern. 

Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst 
flood does not last forever. While they were still shiver¬ 
ing from the effect of the passing blast, the deafening 
roar withdrew into the down-canyon distances, and in a 
few minutes the waters began to subside. 

“A little of that goes a long way, especially when a 
fellow hasn’t had much breakfast to start out with,” said 
Larry with grim humor. Then: “I hope we’re all of us 
as thankful as we ought to be. If that flood had caught 
us anywhere between here and the mouth of the canyon, 
we wouldn’t have known what hit us—at least, not one 
half-second after it did hit us.” 

“But Great Cats!” gasped little Purdick, whose teeth 


SHORT RATIONS 


lOI 


were still chattering, ^Ve’ll never get out of here, as it 
is! You know, well enough, that that flood hasn’t left us 
anything to walk on, either up-stream or down 1” 

^YVait,” Larry said; and even as he spoke the water 
began to sink away as if by magic. In an incredibly short 
time the torrent had subsided, not only to its former 
level, but much below it—so much below it that, lacking 
a trail-path bank, the stream bed itself offered a prac¬ 
ticable trail. 

“It’s all to the good, I guess,” said Purdick, “only I’m 
not just used to seeing things happen this way. Back in 
my native land the rivers don’t scare you to death one 
minute and skip out of sight the next. Let’s go.” 

It was high noon and past when they won out into the 
upper region of thunder storms and cloud-bursts, and by 
that time the skies had cleared and there was nothing but 
a trickling rill here and there to tell of the late deluge. 
As nearly as they could judge, they had about fifteen 
hundred feet more of elevation to make before they could 
cross the range, and after a cold lunch of canned toma¬ 
toes and the remains of the pan-bread that Purdick had 
baked at breakfast-time, they attacked the final ascent. 

On this part of the climb they were obliged to become 
pathfinders in grim earnest. There was no sign of a 
trail, and again and again they found themselves in a 
cut de sac; up against cliffy heights that no mountain 
goat could climb, much less a loaded pack animal. Luck¬ 
ily they had no snow of any consequence to contend with. 
The three added weeks of summer sunshine had taken it 
all save the deep drifts in the gulches, and these were 
melting rapidly. But the zig-zagging and exploring, the 
tramping up and down and back and forth in the effort 


102 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

to find a practicable trail to the summit, tried them to 
the utmost. 

It was after nightfall when they finally topped the 
range, and they could see nothing of what lay before 
them for the next day. But as to that they were too 
tired to care. Purdick made coffee over an alcohol candle, 
and they opened two of the four cans of peaches, agreeing 
to save the potato chips and the corned beef for a greater 
emergency. Eating in silence because they were too weary 
and exhausted to talk, they nearly fell asleep over the 
meagre meal; and as soon as it was swallowed, they 
rolled themselves in their blankets under the lee of the 
only big rock they could find on the bleak mountain top, 
and were asleep in much less time than it takes to tell it. 

It was perhaps just as well for their peace of mind 
that all three of them were much too tired to dream 
dreams or see visions. Or to travel in their astral bodies, 
as the old necromancers used to say a dreamer did. Be¬ 
cause, in that case, they might have seen, at no great 
distance to the north of where they had made their 
hazardous and heart-breaking ascent of the mountain, a 
perfectly good trail leading up and over and down to the 
railroad town of Natrolia on the other side. 

Also, they might have seen, camping in an outpost 
grove of the timber beside this good trail, and only a 
little way from the summit of the pass over which it led, 
three men, one of whom was poking up the coals of the 
camp-fire with the end of a crutch, to the better cooking 
of a panful of bacon slices, saying, as he poked: “It’s all 
right, I tell yuh! They’ll make f’r the Shotgun camp 
after more grub, and we can stock up at Natrolia and 
beat ’em back to the Buttes by two good days, at least. 


SHORT RATIONS 


103 


Yuh can’t lose me in this neck o’ woods, Tom Dowling. 
If yuh wasn’t solid bone from the neck up, yuh’d have 
found that out long ago. Artill’ry? Nix, they won’t 
load up with no more shootin’-irons at Shotgun. ’At’s 
one thing old man Shanklin at the Shotgun Mine don’t 
let nobody sell on his reservation.”- 


CHAPTER VII 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 

P RETTY stiff from their forced march and the chill 
of the night spent on the cold mountain top without 
fire, the three castaways—for so they were now calling 
themselves—were up with the dawn. Now that they 
had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw 
that by going a little farther along the mountain to the 
left they might have camped in timber and had wood for 
a fire. 

“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how 
they had missed what little comfort they might have had. 
“I guess we are more or less tenderfoots yet.” And then 
he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees and gathered 
some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing 
they had to cook. 

Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved 
out on a diet of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to 
call this breakfast on the mountain top the emergency 
they had been economizing for; so Purdick opened the 
can of corned beef and served it with potato chips. For¬ 
tified by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in 
quality, even if it did lack something in quantity, they 
prepared for the descent of the western slope. 

From the western brow of the mountain they had a 
magnificent view of the world at large, as Dick phrased 

104 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


105 


it: mountains and plains, and then more mountains and 
plains, stretching away almost to infinity and back¬ 
grounded in the dim distance by the serrated range of 
the San Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground 
that interested them most. At the foot of the peak upon 
which they were standing there was a range of hogback 
hills, looking, from their height, no larger than a plow- 
turned furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the 
hogback, on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the 
color of well-tanned buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping 
station of Natrolia, a collection of odd-shaped dots, with 
one round dot larger than the rest which they took to 
be the railroad water tank. 

“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aero¬ 
plane, or even a bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us 
very long to coast down there. It looks as if a good 
gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water tank 
from here.” 

“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in. 

“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say, 
isn’t that a railroad train just coming into the town?” 

What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely 
moving along a dimly defined line on the borders of the 
buckskin plain, and trailing off from the head of the 
worm there was a thin black smudge—the smoke from 
the engine’s stack. 

“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train. 
Then: “It doesn’t seem believable that that crawling 
worm of a thing will be in Brewster by dinner-time this 
evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all morning 
admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which 
way do we aim for the go-down, Larry—north or south?” 


io6 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

The question was asked because it was perfectly appar¬ 
ent that they had to aim either one way or the other in 
order to find a place where the descent could be made. 
In the straight-ahead line there was nothing doing. As 
far as they could see in either direction—which wasn’t 
very far because the mountain summit was as crooked 
as a snake—the western slope was as near to being an 
abrupt precipice as it could be and still figure as a slope. 

Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate 
that led him to say: '‘There doesn’t seem to be much 
choice; perhaps we’d better go south.” This when, all 
unknown to them, less than half a mile distant to the 
north lay that excellent trail by which they could have 
reached Natrolia early in the afternoon—and by so doing 
would have changed the entire complexion of any number 
of things. 

But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing, 
so they turned—fatefully, as we say—to the southward, 
skirting the brow of the mountain, without gaining a 
single foot of descent, for two long hours before they 
came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for the 
burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly 
slow. Time and again one of the jacks would slip and 
roll down into some gulch from which it took no end of 
time and labor to rescue it; and when that didn’t happen, 
they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed, 
or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch 
through which they could chimney down from one bench 
of the great mountain to another. 

Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even 
cutting out the noon halt to save time, night overtook 
them long before they were low enough down to get 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


107 

another sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they had to 
camp. 

“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes 
again, anyway,” said Dick as he pulled the packs from 
the burros’ backs and turned the little beasts loose to 
graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go without 
feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear 
a tough siege of it since yesterday noon.” 

Larry grinned. “ ‘A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous 
kind,’ doesn’t it?” he quoted. “Nothing like an empty 
tummy to make you sympathize with other things that 
can’t get enough to eat. How about it, Purdy? Where 
do we land for supper?” 

“Tomatoes and peaches. I’ll cook the tomatoes, if 
you’d rather have ’em hot.” 

“Oh, my suffering ancestors!” Dick groaned. “I’ll 
never be able to look a peach-tree or a tomato-vine in the 
face after this! I’m as hollow as the biggest bass drum 
that was ever built, and you tell me you’ll pass me a plate 
of sloppy peaches with tomatoes on the side! Let’s have 
a barbecue and roast old Fishbait.” 

They joked one another about it over the camp-fire, as 
good sportsmen should, but the hard work and slender 
fare were really beginning to take hold. And the worst 
of it was, the battle wasn’t won yet; a fact upon which 
Larry enlarged to Dick after the camp-fire had been back- 
logged for the night, and Purdick, once more wearied to 
the point of collapse, was asleep in his blankets. 

“I didn’t want to load Purdy up any heavier than he 
is loaded already,” was the way Larry began on the dis¬ 
turbing fact, “but I have a horrible suspicion that we 
are a good way from Natrolia and a fresh supply of eats 


io8 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


yet. Eve been kind of keeping tab on our side-steppings 
all day, and weVe made a pretty stiff lot of southing. 
Don’t you think so?” 

'T know it,” Dick replied gloomily. 

“You’re still up to it, aren’t you?” Larry asked. 

“Up to another day of it, I guess, though I’ll have to 
confess that I don’t feel much thicker than a sheet of 
paper through the middle.” 

“My fix, too,” said Larry. “But that’s all right; we’re 
tough and we can stand it. Purdy’s the lad I’m worry¬ 
ing about. Did you notice that he was eating almost 
nothing at supper?” 

Dick nodded. “You’d say a fellow couldn’t possibly 
starve past the getting-hungry point on two days of short 
rations; but Purdy isn’t normal yet—not outdoor normal. 
We’ll have to watch him to-morrow, and if we see he’s 
breaking, we’ll just dump one of the burro loads and 
make him ride.” 

Larry shook his head. “You don’t know Purdy as 
well as I do. That little rat is the clearest kind of grit, 
all the way through. He’ll drop dead in his tracks before 
he’ll ever let us help him over the bumps.” 

“Huh!” said Dick, spreading his blankets for the night. 
“When the time comes, we won’t ask his royal permis¬ 
sion. We’ll just hog-tie him on old Fishbait’s back, if 
we have to. Good-night. I’m going to dream of all the 
good things there are to eat in this world.” 

The morning of the third day of enforced abstinence 
dawned as beautifully as nearly all of their mornings 
had, thus far, and for breakfast they finished the canned 
things and—figuratively speaking at least—licked the 
cans. Purdick seemed all right again after his night’s 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


109 


rest, but neither Dick nor Larry guessed what an effort 
he had to make to swallow his small share of the peaches 
and tomatoes. 

^‘Feeling equal to a few more miles this morning, 
Purdy?” Larry asked, as they were putting the pack 
saddles on the burros. 

‘T’m still staying with you,” returned the small one 
gamely. Then: '‘You mustn’t worry about me, Larry. 
There have been times in the past when I had to go short 
on the eats for a good deal more than two days hand¬ 
running, and I never thought anything of it. Til get 
my second wind, after a little.” 

“Pm not worrying,” said Larry; but that was not 
strictly true. 

With a start fairly made, Dick took careful compass 
bearings, utilizing every open space they came to as a 
lookout from which to determine, if possible, the amount 
of southing they had made during the previous day. As 
the day wore on without bringing anything that looked 
like a familiar landmark into view, the case began to 
look rather desperate. 

By the middle of the afternoon they were down in a 
region of foot-hills, and the going was much easier; but 
though they still kept working persistently north and 
west, no gap in the hills opened to show them the buck¬ 
skin-colored plain they had seen from the mountain top. 
By this time, Dick and Larry both were growing more 
than anxious about Purdick. Twice Dick had made that 
suggestion about unloading one of the jacks and turning 
it into a riding animal, but Purdick had stoutly fought 
the idea, saying that he was getting along all right. But 
both of his hardier companions could see plainly that he 


no THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

was putting one foot before the other by a sheer effort of 
will. 

At four o’clock Larry called a halt, ostensibly to let the 
burros feed upon a patch of luxuriant grass in the ravine 
they were at that time traversing, but really to give Pur- 
dick a chance to throw himself down and rest—which 
he promptly did. When it came time to go on again, the 
small one said his say briefly. 

*T’m all in, fellows,” he said. ‘'You leave me a couple 
of the blankets and go on without me. When you find 
the town—if you ever do find it—you can come back 
after me. As things stand now, I’m only a drag on the 
wheels.” 

“Yes; I think I see us leaving you!” Dick scoffed. 
“You’re going to get up and climb on old Fishbait’s back. 
We can’t be far from Natrolia now, and he’ll carry you 
all right.” 

Purdick sat up and his pale cheeks flushed suddenly. 

“What do you take me for?” he snapped, but there 
was something suspiciously like a sob at the end of the 
snap. “I told you both before we came west that I was 
no good, and now I’m proving it. It—it just kills me to 
think that I can’t stand up and take things like other 
fellows—like you two do!” And with that, he whirled 
over and buried his face in the grass. 

Larry drew Dick aside and spoke in low tones. 

“It’s up to us,” he said. “He won’t ride, and I doubt 
if he could stick on the burro’s back if he tried. Stay 
here with him while I scout up to the top of that knob 
over there and see if I can find out where we are.” 

Left alone with Purdick, Dick sat down and waited. 
For a long five minutes Purdick lay on his face and made 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES iii 

no sign, but at last he turned over and raised himself on 
an elbow. 

^‘Where’s Larry?” he asked. 

Dick pointed. “There he is—climbing to the top of 
that hill for a look-see. Feeling any better?” 

Purdick sat up and locked his fingers around his knees. 

“Pm so mad I can’t see straight, Dick. It’s fierce to 
be tied down to a no-account body like mine. I’m not 
worth the powder it would take to blow me up!” 

“Oh, hold on!” Dick protested. “This has been a 
pretty stiff tug for all of us. I’m not feeling so very 
much of a much, myself, just now, and neither is Larry.” 

“But you’re not beefing about it, either of you,” Pur¬ 
dick put in. 

“Neither are you,” Dick asserted. “When it comes 
down to pure sand, you’ve got more than either of us. 
You’ve been tramping on sheer nerve, all day long. I 
know it, and Larry knows it.” 

By this time, Larry was coming back down the hill, 
and he didn’t look as if he had seen anything encouraging 
from the top of it. 

“What luck?” Dick asked; and Larry shook his head. 

“Nothing but more hills and hollows. No sign of any 
plain, any town, or any railroad.” 

Little Purdick heaved himself to his feet, getting up 
like a camel—one pair of joints at a time. 

“Come on,” he said. “There are only a few more 
hours of daylight left, and I’ll make myself last that 
long if it kills me.” 

When he said this, neither of the others tried to argue 
with him. They knew it wouldn’t do any good. So the 
line of march was taken up again, upon a course as nearly 


II2 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


due north as the nature of the region would permit. By 
holding this direction they knew absolutely that they must 
come to the railroad, sooner or later; and once in touch 
with that, they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be very far from 
the town. 

Much to Dick’s surprise, though not so much to 
Larry’s—for Larry knew him best—Purdick held out 
bravely; and when it was finally decided that they must 
camp for the night, which they did just before dark, 
Purdick helped gather wood, and himself made the fire 
for the boiling of the coffee water: a final brewing of 
coffee being the only thing they had left in the stripped 
commissary. 

After the warm drink had been served out, and the 
jacks picketed for the night, there was nothing more to 
do, and they all turned in to let a long night’s sleep do 
what it would toward relieving the hunger ache and 
fitting them for another surge on the morrow. 

It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick, 
always a light sleeper, and now particularly so when even 
the slightest doze-off made him dream of banquets, found 
himself sitting bolt upright and listening to a noise that 
was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking 
thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was 
trying in a bewildered half daze to determine what it was, 
a bright glare of light flashed among the trees, the noise 
deepened to a crashing clamor that brought the two 
others out of their blankets with a bound, and all three 
of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards 
at the farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the 
mouth of the little ravine in which they were camped. 

*‘E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away in 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


113 

the western distance. Wouldn’t that pinch your ear 
good and hard? Here we stopped two short steps and a 
jig dance from the railroad track and never knew it! 
Listen I” 

What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a 
locomotive whistle blown in a station signal. 

^^Natrolia,” said Larry. ‘^And it can’t be more than a 
couple of miles away, at that! What time is it, Dick?” 

Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist 
watch. 

^'Five minutes of nine,” he announced. 

Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up. 

^T’m the biggest of the bunch—and the toughest, I 
guess. You two fellows lie down and take another cat¬ 
nap while I saunter into town and buy a few morsels of 
grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be back 
inside of an hour.” 

Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged 
immediately by both of the others, but Larry argued 
them down. There was no need of all going when one 
could easily bring out provisions for a single meal, and 
if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making 
the tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it 
might be over the ties and ballast of a railroad track in 
the dark. So Larry had his way and went alone, taking 
the haversack. 

Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep 
again; they groped around and got more wood and built 
up a good fire so as to have a bed of cooking coals if 
Larry should happen to bring something that needed 
cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and 
about the time they were thinking that Larry might pos- 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


114 

sibly have reached Natrolia, he came tramping back into 
the circle of firelight, with the haversack loaded to burst¬ 
ing dimensions, and with an armful of packages besides. 

“Already?’’ Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the 
burden-bearer. 

“You said it. It’s less than a mile—just around the 
shoulder of this butte behind us. The store was shut, 
but I found the proprietor over at the hotel, and he opened 
up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy. I’ve got 
some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee 
heart.” 

Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Max¬ 
well, junior, may live to sit down to many banquets—at 
least we hope they may—but it is safe to say that that 
late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars in the little 
valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as 
the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not 
stinted his buying. There were potatoes to fry, and a 
thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into squares and broiled 
on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire, and more 
coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard- 
of luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and 
bread—two loaves of good, home-made bread that the 
storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take when she heard 
his story of their starving time. And to top off with, 
Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of pre¬ 
pared pancake flour that Larry had thoughtfully added 
to the haversack load. 

By all the rules of the eating game they should have 
made themselves beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the 
end of three days of short rations and no rations. But 
youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy, vigorous, outdoor 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


115 

life—taking them all together—can sometimes defy all 
rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make 
the feeders sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest 
sleeper of the three, didn’t awaken until a long freight 
train, clattering past on the near-by track a little after 
sunrise, aroused him. 

Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to 
cook a camp breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed 
into the little cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed 
in the shipping corral, and then made an assault upon the 
so-called ‘Eotel,” taking it by storm and putting away a 
breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee and 
cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the 
gorgeous banquet of the night before had already van¬ 
ished into a limbo of dim but precious memories. 

After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for 
a return to the field on the other side of the mountains, 
and from the genial, “old-timer” storekeeper who supplied 
them they learned that they had gone a long way around 
to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail over the 
Little Hophras; one which would take them back—as it 
would have brought them over—in something less than 
a day’s tramping. 

Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man 
behind the counter told them this. “I guess we ought to 
be bored for the hollow-horn, all of us, Mr. Wilkins,” 
he said, “for not looking around a little before we struck 
out. But the Government maps don’t show any such 
trail.” 

“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when 
the maps were made.” 

“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked. 


ii6 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“Plum^ sure. Three men came in over it two days 
ago, did just what you boys are doin’—stocked up and 
went back. They’re prospectin’, like yourselves, I take 
it.” 

All three of the boys exchanged glances at this men¬ 
tion of three men. 

‘‘Did you know any of those men, Mr. Wilkins?” 
Larry inquired. 

“No; kind of a rough-lookin’ bunch, and one of ’em 
was a cripple, though he got around on one leg and a 
crutch sprier than either of the other two.” 

Larry took Dick aside while Purdick was checking the 
list of supplies with the storekeeper. 

“They’re our three,” Larry said in low tones. And 
then, impatiently: “I wish there were some way of letting 
those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong 
tree; that we don’t know any more about the Golden 
Spider than they do!” 

“There doesn’t seem to be any way,” Dick countered. 
“But I can tell you one thing, Larry: I’m not going 
back into the mountains where they are without some¬ 
thing to defend myself with, if it’s nothing more than a 
potato popgun.” 

“I’m with you on that,” said Larry. “Let’s look over 
Mr. Wilkins’s gun showcase and see if we can find any¬ 
thing that we can afford to buy.” 

They moved up to the front of the store, where there 
was a wall-case of guns and pistols. Almost at once they 
saw three Winchesters standing side by side in the rack, all 
alike, and all looking as if they were second-hand. Larry 
went closer and examined the stock of one of the guns 
carefully. 



“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that 
they are barking up the wrong tree.” 







TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


117 

‘‘That’s my rifle, Dick,” he whispered. “There’s that 
bruise on the stock that it got that day last week when 
old Fishbait rolled down among the rocks with it in 
the pack. And the other two are yours and Purdy’s!” 

“Gee I” said Dick, his eyes widening. “Those rascals 
stole them and sold them to Mr. Wilkins 1 Shall w^e tell 
him?” 

Larry’s answer was the kind he usually made when the 
emergency demanded action. Going back to the counter 
where the storekeeper was still figuring with Purdick, he 
said : 

“Mr. Wilkins, we didn’t tell you all that happened to 
us at that camp of ours over in the back country. The 
bear that tore us up was a pretty sly old Silver-tip. Be¬ 
sides eating up most of our grub, he took our gims and 
all of our ammunition.” 

The bearded storekeeper laughed. 

“What’s this you’re givin’ me now?” he asked. 

“Straight goods,” said Larry soberly. “We had three 
Winchesters of the latest model, chambered for high- 
pow'ered ammunition, and a good supply of cartridges 
for them.” 

For a minute or so the big storekeeper didn’t say any¬ 
thing. Then: 

“You ain’t stuffin’ me with that bear story, are ye?” 

“No; there was a bear, all right, and it was the bear 
that ate our grub and tore things up for us.” 

“But after that, some other kind of a bear come along 
and swiped your guns and ca’tridges?” 

“That is the way it looks to us,” Larry said. 

“Well, what you goin’ to do about it?” 

“We are going to buy those three second-hand Win- 


ii8 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Chesters you have up in that case at the front,” Larry 
answered, looking the big man squarely in the eyes. 

The good-natured storekeeper laughed rather grimly. 

‘T reckon you’ve got me dead to rights,” he said; ‘^and 
I ought to 'a’ knowed better. I bought them guns from 
the three scalawags I was tellin’ you about; the three that 
was here day before yesterday. They allowed they didn’t 
need ’em and was tired o’ luggin’ ’em around.” 

“We’ll buy them back from you,” said Dick, going into 
his shirt after his money belt. 

But at this the big man shook his head. 

“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried 
to live honest for fifty years to begin bein’ a Tence’ for 
crooks at my time o’ life. If them guns are yours, you 
take ’em.” 

There was some little haggling over this part of it, 
Dick saying that the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all 
that. But the big man was immovable; he had bought 
stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the penalty. 
So he made them take the guns without money and with¬ 
out price, and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammu¬ 
nition, which, it seemed, had been sold with the rifles. 

What with all this chaffering and buying and talking, 
and the time it took Larry and Dick to write letters to 
their folks in Brewster (which letters, as may be im¬ 
agined, didn’t say anything about the hardships of the 
past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon be¬ 
fore they got a start up the perfectly good trail, con¬ 
siderably past noon when they stopped to eat on top of 
the range, and quite late at night before they left the 
trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far 
from the place where they had located the vanadium 


.TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


119 

deposit, though much higher up the mountain. And on 
all that long faring they had neither seen nor heard any 
signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natro- 
lia storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the 
same trail not more than twenty-four hours earlier. 

Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the 
situation as it had been revealed to them by the events 
of the past few days, and determined upon their course 
of action. 

^Tt’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the 
way Larry the practical summed it up. ^‘These crooks 
are going upon the supposition that we know something 
that we don’t know. If they could be convinced tliat we 
don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine 
than the man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slight¬ 
est intention of trying to find it, they’d drop us like a hot 
cake.” 

‘‘That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are 
we going to convince them ?” 

“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance 
to talk to them. As long as they’re not convinced, I 
suppose they’ll go on dogging us around. I hate to have 
to turn in every night with the feeling that we may wake 
up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again, 
but I guess there is no help for it.” 

It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan. 

“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since 
there are three of us, we needn’t. You two bunk down 
and I’ll take the first night watch. At midnight I’ll 
wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call Larry. 
It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much, 
anyway.” 


120 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Both Larry and Dick grumbled a little at this sort of 
war-like messing-up of their vacation when, as a matter 
of fact, it was, or ought to be, utterly needless. But 
they agreed to Purdick’s plan in the end as being the 
really sensible thing to do, and shortly afterward they 
turned in and left the small one sitting with his back to 
a tree and his rifle across his knees, determined to stay 
awake if the thing were humanly possible. 

For an hour or more he found it entirely possible. 
Apart from the deep breathing of his two sleeping com¬ 
panions and the nibbling noises made by the grazing 
burros, there were no sounds to disturb the solemn silence 
of the immensities. Having to study pretty hard for 
what he was getting in college, Purdick had a pretty safe 
recipe for keeping awake. It took the form of memory 
exercises; the recalling, word for word, of certain formu¬ 
las like this: “If the point of suspension of a pendulum 
have an imposed simple vibration of y equals a cosine st 
in a horizontal line, the equation of small motion of the 
bob is mx equals minus mg times x minus y over I ”— 
things like that. 

Just now, being intensely interested in the science of 
mineralogy, he was repeating the names of all the “ites” 
he could remember by their different groups, with the 
chemical composition of each; and he had just got as far 
as, “Pyrargyrite: silver three atoms, antimony one atom, 
sulphur six atoms,” when he sat up and rubbed his eyes 
and began to wonder if, after all, he had gone to sleep 
and was dreaming. 

For while he stared and stared again, the camp-fire, 
with its back-log and bed of glowing coals, began to sink 
slowly into the ground, the unburnt ends of the back-log 


TOMATOES AND PEACHES 


I2I 


uprearing as the fire sank away. Before he had time to 
gasp twice, there was a gurgle and a hiss, and the fire 
disappeared as if by magic, leaving the tree-shadowed 
ravine in total darkness. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE ICE CAVERN 

F or a second or so after he had seen the camp-fire 
disappear as if a conjuror had waved his wand over 
it, Purdick was too greatly astounded even to yell. Twice 
he opened his mouth to shout at his two sleeping com¬ 
panions, but no sound came. With his teeth rattling in 
something that was a good bit like panic, he felt his way 
over to where Dick and Larry were lying rolled in their 
blankets and shook them awake. 

‘Wake up! S-s-something’s happened!” he stuttered. 
“What is it?” said Dick sleepily, getting up on an 
elbow. Then: “Hello! What made you let the fire go 
out ?” 

“I didn’t!” Purdick protested. “S-s-something sus- 
swallowed it!” 

Larry sat up, fumbled in the knapsack that he had 
stuffed under his head for a pillow, and found matches 
and a candle-end. When he struck a light, the mystery 
was explained—partly. In the place where the fire had 
been there was a round hole possibly three feet in diame¬ 
ter, and out of it a faint wreath of smoke and steam was 
issuing. 

“Well, I’ll be dogged!” Dick exclaimed. “Wouldn’t 
that jar you? Did it go all at once, Purdy?” 

“Right while I was looking at it. First I saw the bed 


122 


THE ICE CAVERN 


123 


of coals sinking, and then the back-log broke in two in 
the middle and the ends began to rear up. I thought I 
must be dreaming.” 

“Good, substantial old dream, all right,” said Dick. 
“Let’s see where that hole goes to, and what made it.” 

The “what made it” was evident enough when they 
crept, rather cautiously, to the edge of the well hole and 
examined it by the light of the candle. Under the thick 
bed of leaf mould carpeting the bottom of the small ravine 
in which they had pitched their night camp there was a 
layer of ice, the remains of a miniature glacier formed, 
possibly, many winters before. By the merest chance, 
their fire had been built over this ice layer and the heat 
had gradually melted a hole. 

“How far down does it go?” Purdick asked, leaning 
over the brink of the well and trying to look down. 

There was no answer to that question. The light of 
the candle wouldn’t penetrate very far, but as far as it 
reached it showed the hole still going on down. Larry 
went to where the jacks were grazing and got one of the 
picket ropes. Tying a piece of wood to the end of the 
rope, he lowered it into the hole. As nearly as they could 
measure, the chasm was about fifteen feet deep. And the 
stick and the rope came up wet. 

“Water in the bottom,” said Larry. “An underground 
stream; you can hear it splashing. That’s what makes 
this ravine so dry. Anybody want to go down and get 
a drink?” 

Dick yawned. “I’m too sleepy to go cave-exploring. 
Let’s make another fire and pigeonhole this thing till 
morning. It’ll keep, I guess.” 

Acting upon this eminently sensible suggestion, they 


124 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


built a fire in another place, gathered enough wood to 
keep it going through the remainder of the night, and 
after they had talked a little while, Dick and Larry turned 
in and Purdick resumed his watch. According to their 
agreement, Purdick roused Dick at midnight and took 
his own turn at the blankets, and at three o’clock Dick 
called Larry. 

At daybreak the two who had slept through the last 
of the night watches turned out to find Larry already 
cooking breakfast. 

^^Haven’t been down in the hole to take a bath, have 
you ?” asked Dick, rubbing his eyes open. 

^^Not yet,” Larry grinned. “Thought Td let one of 
you fellows try it first. I lowered the bucket and got 
the coffee water out of it, though. Help yourselves, if 
you want to wash up.” 

Dick let the bucket down and brought it up brimming. 
“Pour for me, Purdy, and then I’ll return the compli¬ 
ment,” he said; and as Purdick took the bucket and gave 
him the first slosh: “Gee-whizzikins-whillikins! Talk 
about your liquid ice! Whoop-ee! but that’s cold!” 

“Sure it’s cold,” said Larry with another grin. “Didn’t 
expect it to be hot, did you—out of an ice well?” 

While they were at breakfast they speculated a good 
bit on the peculiarity of an ice cavern being there in the 
bed of the little ravine in the heart of summer, and Dick 
was all for exploring it. So, after the meal, a boatswain’s 
chair was rigged at the end of the picket rope, and Larry 
and Purdick lowered the curious one into the well, takine 
a turn around a convenient tree for a snubbing hitch. 
When Dick was hauled out he had a fairy tale to tell. 

“It’s the most wonderful thing you ever saw!” he de- 


THE ICE CAVERN 


125 


dared. ‘‘There’s a cave down there big enough to drive 
a truck through, and it goes right on down the mountain 
somewhere. As far as you can see, it’s lined with ice in 
the most beautiful crystal formations, dazzling, blinding 
white, just from the little light it gets from up here. We 
ought to take a day or so off and explore it.” 

Larry shook his head. 

“It’s a side-issue,” he said firmly, “and we mustn’t 
forget that we are under pay. There are those two 
tungsten prospects and the vanadium claim, on all of 
which we’ve got to do the discovery work required by 
law before we can record and hold them. After we’ve 
done that we can come back here, if you want to, and 
take a look at your ice cave. But business comes first.” 

“Oh, I guess you’re right—you most always are,” Dick 
admitted, making a wry face. “But I’m going to hold 
you to that coming-back promise before we leave this 
part of the country. I want to see where this cave 
goes to.” 

Having settled it that way, they packed and struck out 
for one of the tungsten prospects they had found some 
ten days earlier, reaching it in good time to pitch a sort 
of semi-permanent camp near-by. 

Wolframite, scheelite, ferberite and huebnerite, all 
mineral combinations from which the metal tungsten is 
obtained, occur in a number of curiously different forma¬ 
tions, sometimes in the limestone, sometimes in the red 
sandstones and shales, sometimes in veins whose walls 
are granite or gneiss. What the three young prospectors 
had found, or believed they had found, in this first loca¬ 
tion was a vein of scheelite—which is the tungstate of 


126 


.THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


calcium—lying along a ‘Tault” contact between vein walls 
of granite and gneiss. 

It was a good-sized vein, big enough to be pretty valu¬ 
able if it were really scheelite, and they ran another test 
on it to make sure, before they should waste any labor 
on the ^‘discovery” work required by law—namely, the 
sinking of a shaft or the driving of a tunnel for at least 
ten feet on the vein. 

The test, in which Larry handled the blowpipe and 
Dick and Purdick made the notes, seemed entirely suc¬ 
cessful. The creamy yellowish ore fused with consider¬ 
able difficulty in the blowpipe flame, as the book said it 
should; powdered, it dissolved freely in hydrochloric acid, 
leaving a greenish-yellow residue, and this residue, rubbed 
with a knife-blade on a bit of paper, changed at once to a 
bluish-green color. 

‘‘That’s the stuff,” said Dick. “Now try it with the 
phosphoric acid.” 

Larry poured a little of the dissolved ore into a glass 
tube with a closed end, added phosphoric acid, and held 
the tube in the flame of the alcohol heating lamp. When 
the mixture began to give off the fumes of volatilization, 
he took the tube from the flame and let it cool. In a 
minute or two the test sample turned a beautiful blue. 

“Right, again,” said Dick. “That’s what it ought to 
do. Now dissolve it in water and see if the color will 
disappear.” 

Larry added the water, and immediately the blue color 
vanished. 

“Check once more,” Purdick said, with his finger on 
the place in the mineralogy book where the various steps 


THE ICE CAVERN 


127 

in the test were set forth, with their results. ‘^Now a 
pinch of the iron powder.” 

“There you are,” Larry summed up, when, with the 
addition of the iron, the blue color came back. “I guess 
we’re pretty safe to begin digging to-morrow morning.” 

Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got 
out the hammer and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and 
became stone quarriers, setting themselves the task of 
driving a “discovery” tunnel on the vein, because it was 
easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new to the 
quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering 
their hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning 
only by laborious experience in drilling the hard rock 
how to place their blasts where they would do the most 
good. 

Taking one thing with another, they spent nine of the 
long summer days on this job before Larry’s pocket tape- 
line told them they had the necessary ten feet of depth; 
after which it took part of another day to lay off the 
claim and stake it and post it with the proper notice. In 
honor of the leading burro, they named the lode the 
“Blue Fishbait.” 

Shifting that afternoon to the location of the other 
tungsten deposit they had discovered, they went through 
the same process here. In this place, however, the min¬ 
eral, which was wolframite or ferberite, was in a softer 
formation; which was lucky because it was so situated 
that they couldn’t uncover it by tunnelling, and had to sink 
a shaft ten feet down on the vein. Larry took half a 
day to hack out a rude windlass with the hand-axe, and 
again they set to work drilling and blasting. 

A week sufficed for this second “discovery” develop- 


128 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


ment, and once more they moved on, this time to the 
vanadium deposit they had uncovered and located on the 
day of the bear’s visitation. By this time they had 
acquired a good bit more skill in handling the hammer 
and drills and dynamite, and were able to make the rock 
fly in fairly adequate quantities at each shot. It was 
Dick, the impatient one, who was continually urging 
speed and still more speed. This workaday rock digging, 
merely for the purpose of earning the right to record a 
claim, didn’t appeal to him, and he was eager to have it 
over with, and to get back to the really interesting part 
of the prospecting—ranging the mountains back and forth 
and looking for new lodes. 

“Gee, fellows!” he said, as they sat around their camp¬ 
fire one night at the vanadium claim, “do you realize that 
this is the second week in August, and that we’ve got to 
be back at Old Sheddon the first week in September?” 

“I’m realizing it mighty hard,” Purdick asserted. “I 
want what Old Sheddon is trying to give me in the way 
of an engineering course, but I haven’t had enough of 
this bully old wild life here in the mountains yet, not by 
a jugful.”' 

Larry’s broad smile was good-naturedly joshing. 

“What you’ve been needing all your life was a quarry- 
man’s job outdoors, Purdy,” he commented. “It’s sure 
making a man of you. You don’t look much like the 
little white-faced hospital rat you were when you came 
in with us in June.” 

Purdick pulled up a shirt sleeve, made a fist and slowly 
curved his arm upward. “Look at that muscle!” he 
bragged. “Essence of striking-hammer did that. Talk 
about your hour a day in the gym. Make it ten hours a 



THE ICE CAVERN 


129 

day with the hammer and drills in the woods and you’ll 
get somewhere.” 

“Just listen at the feather-weight, will you?” laughed 
Dick; adding: “But Larry’s right, Purdy; you look twice 
the chap you did a month ago. And it does me good 
to see the way you eat. The old grizzly that cleaned us 
out a while back had nothing on you.” 

“M’m,” said Larry thoughtfully. “Speaking of griz¬ 
zlies, and such things: I wonder what has become of the 
three hold-ups? We’ve been so busy with all the rock 
drilling and blasting that I’d just about forgotten them.” 

“Got discouraged and dropped us, I guess,” Dick put 
in. “If they hadn’t, we would have heard from ’em 
before this time. And that brings on more talk. Have 
we definitely decided not to have a try at looking for old 
Jimmie Brock’s lost gold mine?” 

Dick’s question reopened a subject which had been 
pretty well ignored thus far during the busy summer. 
Of the three, Dick was the only one who had ever taken 
the matter of the lost gold mine at all seriously, and at 
times when Larry or Purdick pinned him down, he joked 
about it, as they did. But now he confessed that he was 
just romantic enough, or foolish enough, to want to spend 
at least a little of the time remaining to them in a search 
for the Golden Spider. 

His argument was fair enough. He said, and it was 
true, that the three rare-metal discoveries they had made 
amply justified them in using the remaining two weeks 
as they pleased; that his uncle would be more than satis¬ 
fied with their summer’s work as it stood; and that that 
same uncle, in telling them about the Golden Spider and 
giving them James Brock’s pencil sketch, had fully ex- 


130 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


pected that they would do as he himself had done—make 
a search for the lost mine. 

In the end it came to a compromise, as most questions 
with two perfectly good and debatable sides usually do. 
For one of the two remaining weeks of their stay they 
would go on prospecting for the industrial metals, work¬ 
ing their way back toward that part of the Little Hophras 
included in the penciled circle drawn by Daddy Long- 
beard on the worn map he had given Dick. And when 
they got within the circle the search for the Golden Spider 
should take precedence for the final week. 

‘‘Not that anything will come of it,’’ Larry maintained. 
“These mountains are full of fairy tales just like that, 
and you know it as well as I do, Dick. But if you want 
to put in a few days looking for a pot of rainbow gold, 
it’s all right with me.” 

“And with me,” little Purdick agreed; and so it was 
settled. 

Upon the completion of the discovery work on the vana¬ 
dium claim the compromise agreed upon in this camp-fire 
talk was made the order of the day. For a week they 
combed the foot-hills and hogbacks of the western range 
faithfully, working slowly up to the region included in 
Daddy Longbeard’s magic circle, and finding nothing in 
the way of rare metals save in one place where, in a mass 
of finely brecciated granite and porphyry they discovered 
a lot of thin quartz veinlets carrying a little molybdenite 
from which the metal molybdenum, an alloy for tool steel, 
is extracted. 

They marked this place on their map, but did not stop 
to locate the claim, the quantity of molybdenite in the 
tiny veins being so small that they decided it would not 


THE ICE CAVERN 


131 

pay for the working. One day^s prospecting beyond this 
brought them fairly within the Daddy Longbeard circle, 
and, somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves 
camping within a short distance of the trail over which 
they had come from Natrolia, and no very great distance 
from the high-lying ravine of the ice cavern. 

*T told you we’d have to come back to that ice cave,” 
said Dick, in the after-supper talk around the camp-fire. 
*T move you that we go up to-morrow and explore it. 
Do I hear a second to that motion?” 

*'Oh, if you can’t be happy until you do—of course,” 
said Larry. You’re just about as likely to find the Gol¬ 
den Spider there as anywhere else. You’re crazy on this 
golden insect proposition, Dick.” 

*‘The world owes lots of its progress to crazy people, 
you old stick-in-the-mud—or to people that other folks 
called crazy. Don’t you know that?” Dick retorted. 
“Besides, a spider isn’t an insect. It’s an arthropod, and 
has eight legs, while the insects have only six. I’m aston¬ 
ished that you know so little.” 

“Fll bet you ninety-nine people out of a hundred call 
’em insects, anyway,” Larry maintained. 

“I’m the hundredth man,” Dick boasted. “I believe in 
spiders, golden or otherwise. What are we going to do 
with our bonanza, when we find it? Have you fellows 
decided upon that yet?” 

''When we find it!” Larry snorted. “Better say fif,’ 
and say it in capital letters, at that.” 

“It wouldn’t be ours, if we should find it,” Purdick 
objected. 

“Of course it would,” Dick asserted. “Didn’t you 
hear what Uncle Billy said? James Brock gave it to 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


132 

him, and he gave it to us. But, as far as that goes, it 
isn’t anybody’s mine, the way it stands now. Or rather, 
it belongs to anybody who may come along and relocate 
it. The law says that a certain amount of work must 
be done every year to hold a claim, and it is three years 
since poor old Jimmie Brock died.” 

‘^Then those three hold-ups would have as good a legal 
right to it as anybody, if they should find it?” Purdick 
asked. 

“Sure they would, if they happen to beat us to it; or if 
they could jump it and take it away from us before we 
could get it recorded in our names. That’s probably 
what they meant to do: run us off, and two of them 
hold it while the other could light out for the nearest 
land office and get it recorded.” 

Little Purdick laughed and took a small shot at him¬ 
self, as his habit was. 

“I’m not very brave. I guess I’m rather glad those 
fellows have dropped us,” he said. 

“Umph!” Larry grunted, stretching himself luxuri¬ 
ously on his blanket. “Who was it that followed the 
crutch cripple that night in Lost Canyon, I’d like to know ? 
But of course tJiat didn’t take any nerve.” 

“That’s all right; sleuthing a cripple is one thing, and 
a stand-up fight is another,” Purdick qualified. “I guess 
I wouldn’t be much good in a real, for-sure scrap.” 

They went on talking for a little while, Dick getting 
back to his cocksureness that the Golden Spider would be 
found, and Larry throwing cold water in bucketsful, as 
he usually did when the lost mine was under discussion. 
As once before, it was little Purdick who broke in to turn 
the talk current into another channel. 


THE ICE CAVERN 


133 


‘Talking about minerals—and weVe been eating and 
drinking and sleeping them all summer—Ed like to know 
what this is,” he said, taking a piece of brownish stone 
from his pocket. ‘T picked it up when we were scouting 
along this afternoon and dropped it into my pocket and 
forgot it.” 

Larry and Dick both examined the specimen and could 
make nothing of it. “Brown stone” was the only name 
that fitted it, and it had no lustre, and no metallic “streak” 
when it was scratched. The only hint it gave of being 
other than it seemed to be—a bit of soft brown stone— 
was in its weight. Dick looked at his wrist watch. 

“IBs early yet,” he said. “Get out the blowpipe and 
chemicals, Purdy, and we’ll run a test on it.” 

Since the specimen crumbled quite easily, it was only 
a matter of a few minutes to grind a small part of it to 
powder in the porcelain mortar. To the powder was 
added a little borax to serve as a flux for any metal there 
might be in the sample, the mixture was heaped upon the 
cake of prepared charcoal, and the blowpipe flame was 
turned upon it, Dick furnishing the breath for the blast. 

In due time the tiny heap began to fuse and disappear, 
but not all of it. In the small burned cavity in the char¬ 
coal cake lay a bright pinhead button of metal: light 
yellow while hot, but cooling to a deeper yellow when 
the blowing stopped. 

During the long summer of prospecting the three ap¬ 
prentice mineralogists had had experience enough in ore 
testing to know at once that only one metal in the entire 
list—and only one form of it, at that—could be thus 
smelted pure from the vein matter in a simple blowpipe 
flame. Dick was the first to find speech. 


134 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘Tree gold!” he gasped. And then: “That stuff is 
disintegrated quartz! Pity’s sake! I ought to have 
known it at sight. Goodness knows, I’ve seen enough of 
it in the mineral cabinets at home to know what it looks 
like.” 

Larry was dropping a few drops of strong nitric acid 
into a test tube while Purdick lighted the alcohol heating 
lamp. Carefully depositing the tiny globule of metal in 
the acid, Larry heated the closed end of the tube in the 
alcohol flame. This was to determine the pureness of 
the gold. If it were alloyed with silver, the hot acid 
would immediately dissolve the silver. But there was no 
chemical reaction visible, and the tiny globule remained 
apparently undiminished in size; which meant that it was 
practically all gold. 

“It’s the pure quill,” Larry declared, speaking for the 
first time since the testing began. “Now then, Purdy, 
where did you find it? That’s the next thing.” 

But now Purdick was in despair. 

“I can’t tell—can’t remember, to save me. I’m not even 
sure that I should know the place if I should see it again. 
I just picked up that bit of stuff as I’ve been picking up 
hundreds of other bits of rock in the last few weeks, and 
I don’t know what made me keep it, unless it was the 
queer, rusty-iron color. I do remember now that I 
thought it was a bit of iron ore and wondered what it 
was doing up here among the granites.” 

“Well,” said Dick with a grim little smile, “you’ve dis¬ 
covered a gold mine and you’re in the same fix that we 
all are with the Golden Spider. You had it, and you’ve 
lost it.” 


THE ICE CAVERN 


135 

'^Could you go back over the route you took this after¬ 
noon?’’ Larry asked. 

‘T’m afraid I couldn’t do even that much.” 

^Was it higher up the mountain than this—or lower 
down?” 

Purdick put his face in his hands and tried to think, 
and the harder he tried the more confusing the recollec¬ 
tions—or no recollections—became. 

“I don’t know,” he said at length. ‘‘You know we all 
separated in the afternoon, agreeing to meet here. I 
remember climbing two or three gulches, and working 
around one place where there was a steep slope and a 
pile of broken rock. At the top of the slope, as I recall 
it, there was a cliff. I remember that, because I had 
half a mind to climb up to the cliff to find out what kind 
of rock it was. But the slope was pretty steep and I 
didn’t.” 

“And was that where you picked up this piece ofl 
quartz ?” Dick asked. 

Purdick made helpless motions with his hands. 

“Don’t ask me,” he protested. “The more I try to 
remember, the worse off I get.” 

“Well,” Larry put in, with a copying of Dick’s grim 
smile, “you’ll always have it to tell that you once dis¬ 
covered a gold mine—a real bonanza, at that. Let’s 
turn in and hope that you may dream out the place. I 
guess that’s about the only hope there is kft.” 

A few minutes later they had made their simple prepa¬ 
rations for the night. Though they had long since con¬ 
cluded that the three would-be mine jumpers had given 
up the chase, they still kept up the habit they had formed 
of dividing the night into three watches, more because 


136 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


it was a habit than for any imaginable danger that might 
threaten them or their belongings. 

On this particular night it was Dick’s turn to take the 
first watch up to midnight, and after Larry and Purdick 
were asleep he put some pitchwood on the fire and got 
out the mineralogy book, meaning to kill some of the 
waking time by reading. Most naturally, after the test 
they had just made, he turned to the various sections on 
gold and gold testing, and was soon so deeply interested 
as to forget what he was sitting up for, to become com¬ 
pletely oblivious to his surroundings. 

It was perhaps for this cause that he failed to hear a 
slight rustling in a clump of young spruces on the oppo¬ 
site side of the fire; failed, also, to see a shadowy figure 
hopping away into the night—the figure of a man walking 
with the aid of a crutch. If he had heard and seen, and 
had known that the vanishing spy had been a listening 
witness to all that had been said and done at the camp¬ 
fire, it is safe to say that nothing less than manacles and 
a gag would have kept him from leaping up and giving 
the alarm. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE spidery's web 

O N THE morning following the test made upon the 
bit of gold quartz that Purdick had picked up, 
Larry, who had the watch from three o’clock to day¬ 
break, found himself getting so sleepy in the final hour 
of his watch that he had to get up and stir around to keep 
awake. ■ ^ 

Renewing the camp-fire so that there might be a good 
bed of coals for the breakfast cooking, he contrived to 
kill time until it was light enough to enable him to see 
the surrounding objects. Then, as Dick and little Pur¬ 
dick were still sleeping soundly, he picked up the hammer 
they used for breaking samples and started out for an 
early-morning walk, meaning to have a look at a curious 
rock and earth deposit he had come upon the evening 
before, after it was too near dark to examine it closely. 

Turning to the left along the bench or ledge over which 
they had climbed to reach the camping place, he pushed on 
around the mountain until he came to the rock and earth 
slide that he wanted to investigate. Finding it nothing 
more than an interesting example of one of the prehistoric 
upheavals that have folded the earth’s crust into so many 
singular and apparently impossible combinations in the 
western mountain ranges, he was about to turn back when 

137 


138 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

he saw, just at his feet, a curious round hole in the clay 
of the slide. 

Now there is one good thing that prospecting for min¬ 
erals does for anybody who goes at it seriously: it 
develops a habit of scrutinizing the whys and wherefores 
of things—any little thing; the habit of prying observa¬ 
tion which is usually credited, in stories, to the detective, 
but which really belongs to every thoughtful student in 
any field. Larry stooped to examine the hole in the clay. 
It was a little over an inch in diameter and about two 
inches deep, circular at the bottom and elliptical at the 
top. 

Squatting beside it, Larry stared at it reflectively. His 
first assumption was that it had been made by a bug or 
insect of some sort, but that conclusion was set aside 
when he remembered that no burrowing bug that he had 
ever heard of made a hole just like this. After a little, 
he took the tape measure from his pocket and with it 
described a circle three feet in diameter with the curious 
hole for its center. Then he got down on his hands and 
knees and crawled around the circle with his eyes on the 
ground, making two complete circuits before he was 
satisfied. 

“Nothing doing,’' he muttered, as he got upon his feet 
again; and then, with a slow grin: “Muttonhead!—of 
course there wouldn’t be, at three feet!” 

Resorting to the tape again, he sti*uck a wider circle, 
spacing it six feet from the hole. This time there were 
results—or one result, at least. At a point just beyond 
one side of the bigger circle there was another hole, the 
exact mate of the one he had first discovered; round at 
the bottom and elongated considerably at the top. Noting 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 


139 


the direction of the elongation and the lining-up of the 
two holes, he paced off another six feet, and there, under 
his eyes, was a third hole. 

With his lips pursed in a soundless whistle he climbed 
to the top of a near-by boulder and let his gaze sweep the 
slopes below. The morning calm was on the landscape, 
with no breath of air stirring to whisper in the trees. 
The boulder-top height commanded a view for miles in 
three directions, but there was nothing to be seen but the 
statuesque procession of buttes and valleys, mountain 
slopes and wooded gulches. 

Preparing to go back to camp, Larry did a character¬ 
istic thing; that is to say, it was characteristic of him. 
One of the three holes was in a sort of plastic clay, much 
like that used by sculptors in modeling. Going down on 
his knees, he dug carefully all around the hole with his 
pocket-knife, lifting out a chunk of the clay about the 
size of a pint cup with the hole intact in the middle of it. 
Wrapping the lump of clay in his handkerchief, he swung 
away to retrace his steps to the camp in the farther gulch. 

Both Purdick and Dick were up when he got back, 
and Purdick had breakfast nearly ready. 

“Hello, you old early bird,” Dick called out. “Got a 
handkerchief-ful of worms already?” 

Larry didn’t say what he had. Putting the handker¬ 
chief-wrapped “specimen” in the cleft of a rock, he 
turned in to help Purdick dish up the breakfast; and 
later, while they were eating, he said nothing about his 
curious find. But when the last flapjack was eaten, he 
reached for the lump of clay, unwrapped it, and showed 
it to the others. 

“What do you make of that?” he asked. 


140 THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

Both' Dick and Purdick examined the “specimen’’ 
closely. 

“What’s the answer?” said Dick, looking up. 

“That’s what I’d like to have you tell me. I found 
three of those holes a quarter of a mile away around the 
mountain. They were about six feet apart, and all 
alike.” 

It was Purdick’s shrewd intelligence that jumped to 
the one inevitable conclusion. “A crutch print!” he 
breathed; ‘Hhe crutch print!” 

Larry nodded. “That was the way I doped it out.” 

Without another word Purdick got up and began to 
circle the camp site with his nose to the ground. In the 
little grove of spruces to the left he found what he was 
looking for. 

“Half a dozen of ’em over here,” he announced; “one 
deep one, as if the crutch had been leaned on for a good 
while.” 

For a little time nobody said anything, and when the 
silence was broken, it was Dick who broke it. 

“The guess we made last night—that these scamps had 
given up and gone away—doesn’t go,” he said soberly. 
“They’re still camping on our trail, and those marks over 
there under the spruces must have been made after we 
camped here last night. If we hadn’t been keeping watch, 
we would probably have lost our guns again.” 

“Well ?” said Larry. 

“Meaning that you want me to say what I think we 
ought to do?” asked Dick. 

“Something like that—yes.” 

“All right; I’ll say it. I’m about fed up on this thing, 
and here’s my fling at it. Let’s leave Purdy here with 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 


141 

the jacks and dunnage, while you and I go after these 
fellows and read the riot act to them—tell them they’ve 
got to quit chasing us around and spying on us or there’ll 
be trouble.” 

Larry shook his head slowly. 

‘‘That won’t do, Dick,” he objected. “In the first place, 
we don’t know where to go to look for them, and in the 
second, they’d be three to two, and they’d just laugh at 
us. More than that, we can’t prove anything on them ; 
couldn’t even in a court, unless we could bring the Natro- 
lia storekeeper to testify that they sold him our rifles.” 

“Well, we could at least give them fair warning,” Dick 
persisted; “tell them that we’ll shoot on sight if anybody 
comes messing around our camp.” 

Again Larry shook his head. 

“Even at that we’d have the weak end of the thing. 
This is all wild land, and they’ve got as good a right in 
any part of it as we have. No; the only thing to do is to 
go on as we’ve been doing. They won’t interfere with 
us so long as we don’t find the Golden Spider—and that’s 
a good bet that they’ll never interfere with us at all.” 

“Everything goes,” Dick acquiesced. “But I’ll say this 
much: if they come monkeying around any time while 
I’m on watch there’ll be blood on the moon. As I say. 
I’m fed up. Let’s call it a back number and move on up 
to that ice cave. To-day’s as good a day as any to do a 
little exploring among the ‘pretties.’ . . . Oh, chortle, if 
you want to!”—this to Larry. “When you go down in 
there and see what I saw, you’ll say it’s worth all the 
trouble.” 

It was while they were loading the jacks that Purdick 
said: 


14 ^ 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“There’s one thing that we’ve sort of overlooked. If 
that cripple was spying and listening last night, any time 
before we turned in, he must have seen us run the test 
on that piece of gold quartz.” 

“Supposing he did,” said Dick. 

“It’s all right, of course—if he saw and heard every¬ 
thing that was done and said, heard me say that I 
couldn’t remember where I found the piece of quartz. 
But if he only saw and heard part of it . . . You see 
what I’m getting at. We tested a piece of gold ore, and 
it was rich enough to make us all go bug-eyed. Gold ore, 
to that bunch, means the Golden Spider. Supposing he 
rambled off with the notion in his head that we’ve dis¬ 
covered the lost mine at last ?” 

“Humph!” Dick grunted. “In that case. I’ll probably 
get my shot at one or two of ’em sooner than I expected 
to. Got Lop-Ear cinched, Larry? All right; let’s go.” 

The distance up to the ravine of the ice cave proved to 
be less than they thought it was and it was soon traversed. 
Upon reaching the site of the former camp they found 
that a curious change had taken place in the ravine bot¬ 
tom. The round hole melted by the heat of their camp¬ 
fire was very considerably enlarged, not sidewise, but 
lengthwise, and the ice had disappeared—thawed away 
completely, showing the bare rock walls of a narrow 
crevice on either side, though there was still a miniature 
torrent racing along at the bottom of the crack. 

By reason of these changes it was no longer necessary 
to use the rope as a means of descent into the depths. 
At its up-mountain end the ice-freed crevice ran out in 
a series of rude, stair-like steps, down which it was easy 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 143 

to scramble. It was Dick who led the way into the cave, 
after they had unloaded the burros and picketed them. 

^^Gee! all my pretty ice stalactites are melted and gone,” 
he lamented; and then: “Whew! feel that current of 
warm air, will you? No wonder the ice has disappeared. 
Where do you suppose the warm wind is coming from?” 

His assertion concerning the disappearance of the ice 
decorations was verified when they got far enough down 
to get a glimpse into the great chamber he had seen and 
tried to describe after his two companions had hauled 
him out of the well hole at the end of the picket rope. 
There was no ice to be seen anywhere, though the walls 
were still wet in spots as from some melting reservoir 
overhead. 

Larry lighted a candle and began to examine the walls 
of the chamber, and Dick laughed. 

“Once a prospector, always a prospector,” he said jok¬ 
ingly. “Expecting to find a bonanza down here, old 
scout ?” 

“Not quite,” Larry answered. “I was just wondering 
if this is a water-cut canyon—or was once, before it got 
filled up and covered over.” 

“What else would it be?” Purdick asked. 

“Pm not much of a geologist,” Larry returned, “but 
we all know this: that every mineral vein in the world 
was once just a crack in the rocks that got filled up at 
some later time with gangue matter and mineral-bearing 
stuff. It just occurred to me to wonder if this isn’t one 
of the cracks that failed to get filled up—in this part of 
it, at least.” 

“You couldn’t tell,” Dick put in. 

“No; not positively, of course. But I believe I’m right. 


144 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


just the same. This wall rock doesn’t show any trace of 
water-wearing. It’s as clean as if the crack had been 
split open only yesterday.” 

Dick laughed. ^‘Let’s make the geology a little more 
practical and go on. I’d like to see how far this thing 
extends, and what makes the warm wind.” 

Their passage through the crevice was unobstructed 
for quite a considerable distance. Slowly the daylight 
from the crack-like opening in the ravine bottom receded, 
growing fainter and fainter until at length it disappeared 
entirely and they were dependent upon the candle to 
light their way. And still the crevice held on, going 
deeper and deeper into the mountain, narrowing in some 
places to tunnel width, and then widening out again into 
a spacious corridor. 

They had gone possibly a quarter of a mile from the 
ravine entrance, though in the silence and darkness it 
seemed like a much greater distance, when Larry called 
a halt. 

“Hold up a minute, fellows,” he cautioned. “We’re 
getting too far away from our base of supplies. After 
what we found out this morning, it won’t do to leave the 
jacks and all our belongings sticking around where any¬ 
body can pick them up and walk off with them.” 

“Gee! I forgot all about that,” said Dick. “Let’s 
hurry back. Maybe those crooks have cleaned us out 
already 1” 

Purdick had the candle at the moment and was digging 
with the pick end of the geologist’s hammer at a soft 
streak of something in the left-hand wall. 

“I wish we had another candle,” said he. “I’d like to 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 145. 

stay here long enough to see what this is. It looks like 
a small vein of galena.” 

^^Never mind that now!” Dick exclaimed. ‘We can 
come back again, if we want to. yVc mustn’t leave our 
traps alone another minute!” 

Hurrying as well as they could over the broken stone 
floor of the crevice, and stumbling now and again into 
the small torrent that was coursing through it, they won 
back to the daylight crack and climbed out. Their alarm 
had been needless. The jacks were grazing peacefully 
in the ravine, and the camp dunnage was lying just as 
they had left it. 

Dick laughed rather shamefacedly. 

“What is there about an underground job to make a 
fellow get panicky all in a minute?” he asked. “When 
you mentioned what might happen up here while we were 
all down yonder in that cellar, I could just see those three 
crooks digging out through the woods with every last 
thing we had in the world.” 

“Umphl” said the practical-minded Larry. “Great 
thing to have a vivid imagination. Got enough of the 
exploring, or do you want to go back?” 

'Td like to go back,” Purdick asserted. “I more than 
half believe that I found a vein of mineral just as you 
fellows turned in the fire alarm.” 

Larry was looking down at the rude flight of natural 
steps up which they had just clambered in getting out of 
the crevice. 

“If you fellows think it’s worth while, I believe we can 
get the jacks down there,” he suggested. “If we do that, 
we can carry the dunnage down and load the jacks in the 
cave.” 


146 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


‘‘And take ’em with us?” Dick said. 

‘‘Why, yes, as far as we go—or as long as the going is 
possible for them. Why not?” 

“There isn’t any ‘why not,’ ” Dick broke out, with 
a swift return of the exploring enthusiasm; and he and 
Purdick went to catch the burros. 

But after the little beasts had been brought to the head 
of the precipitous stairway, the old adage, that one man 
can lead a horse to water, but twenty can’t make him 
drink, seemed to apply to donkeys as well as to horses. 
Fishbait shied and braced himself like the end man on a 
tug-of-war rope, and Lop-Ear, taking the cue from his 
file leader, did the same. 

Now there certainly wasn’t, or wouldn’t appear to be, 
any sufficient reason for going to any great amount of 
trouble to get the burros down into the cave; but human 
beings are curious creatures, in a good many ways. Real¬ 
izing fully that, in all probability, the game wasn’t at all 
worth the candle, the three set their heads determinedly 
upon getting the pack animals underground, and the more 
the jacks held back, the more determined they became. 
So, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and pushing 
and heaving, the little pack animals were finally got down 
to the comparatively level floor of the crevice, the packs— 
less cumbersome now because the provisions were running 
low—were adjusted, a couple of candles were lighted, 
and once more the exploring expedition—which had now 
become a caravan—moved forward. 

Once in the depths, the burros gave ho more trouble; 
indeed, as Dick remarked, they trudged along much as 
if they had been reared as mine mules. Reaching their 
“farthest north” of the previous exploration, they stopped 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 


147 


long enough to let Purdick examine his galena find, which 
turned out to be, not galena, but a small pocket of pyrites 
not worth bothering with. 

Beyond this point the slit in the rock narrowed again, 
and became quite tortuous in its course; so narrow and 
so crooked in places that they had some trouble in getting 
the loaded jacks through. The tor renting stream which 
had been underfoot in the first few hundred yards had 
now taken to disappearing and reappearing, dodging un¬ 
derground and then coming out again to flow for a time 
through a channel in the floor of the cavern. The roof 
of the natural tunnel, ten or twelve feet high where they 
had entered it, now came down in some places so low 
that they could reach up and touch it with their hands; 
touch it, and also see what it was made of. 

“I don’t much like the looks of this stuff overhead,” 
Larry said, holding his candle up to light the low-hanging 
roof. “You can see what it is: nothing but loose rocks 
and forest rubbish that has been blown or washed in from 
the surface. If it should take a notion to fall down and 
plug this runway, we’d be strictly out of the fight.” 

“You said something then,” said Dick. “Here’s hoping 
she doesn’t take the notion—not while we’re in here, 
anyway.” 

Now this was a good hope, but in making it Dick 
failed to put enough staying power in it. At one of the 
tightest places in the narrow passage, where the walls 
were pinched together and the roof was hardly man- 
head high, Dick, who was tail-ender in the procession of 
three and was leading Lop-Ear, was brought up standing 
by a sudden pull on the halter from behind. 

Facing around to let his candle show him what the 


148 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


sudden halt meant, he saw that Lop-Ear, or his pack, 
or both, were stuck in the passage. It didn’t seem to be 
a very bad stick, so he hunted up a niche to put the candle 
in, wrapped the hackamore strap around his hands, and 
braced himself for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull 
all together. 

The scheme worked all right, so far as starting the 
stopped rear-guard was concerned. While Dick pulled 
manfully, the little pack-beast dug its hoofs in, humped 
its back, and came through the squeeze triumphantly. 
But the triumph was short-lived. At the releasing of 
the resistance to his pull, Dick had to run backward a 
few steps to recover his balance. The little involuntary 
backward run was probably all that saved his life, as 
well as that of the burro. For that was the precise in¬ 
stant when the weak-kneed hope that Dick had offered 
turned loose its hold: there was a rumbling sound like a 
huge earth sigh, a choking rush of dust-laden air, and 
the tunnel roof, in the exact spot where the high-piled 
jack load had touched it, had fallen in and plugged the 
passage. 

Dick yelled promptly to his companions, who had 
passed out of sight around the next turn in the corridor, 
and they both came back to see what was wanted. Dick 
held his candle up to show them the plugged passage. 

''Humph!” said Larry; "that does settle it. We’re 
trapped for fair, I should say. How did it happen?” 

Dick explained. "Lop-Ear was stuck and I pulled on 
the halter to help him through. I guess he humped him¬ 
self so hard that the pack knocked against the roof and 
loosened it. I wonder how long it’s going to take us 
to dig our way out ?” 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 


149 


Larry shook his head. ‘‘That’s a horse—or a donkey— 
of another color. Depends on how much of the stuff has 
fallen. Purdy, run on ahead to where we left Fishbait 
and get the pick and shovel from his pack.” 

When the digging tools were brought, they attacked 
the plug manfully, spelling one another with the pick 
and shovel. A full hour of the hardest kind of work got 
them nowhere. Apparently there was no end to the 
amount of broken rock and earth mould that had fallen 
in; and, worse than that, they had no place to put the 
stuff as they dug it out. All they could do was to pile 
it up behind them as they dug, and that merely shifted 
the obstructing plug from one place to another. 

“They say that curiosity killed the cat,” said Purdick, 
at the end of the hour of hard labor, when they sat down 
on the pile of debris for a breathing spell. “If I hadn’t 
been so curious about that pocket of pyrites and per¬ 
suaded you fellows to come back into this hole-” 

“Nothing like that,” Dick cut in promptly. “If there’s 
any blame lying around loose, it’s mine. But taking the 
blame doesn’t get us out of here. What do you say, 
Larry?” 

“There doesn’t seem to be much left to say—only 
more of the same. We’re in here, and we’ve got to dig 
our way out, if it takes a month of Sundays.” 

“Huh!” Dick grunted. “The grub won’t last for more 
than two Sundays, if it does that; and we can’t feed the 
jacks on bacon and canned stuff.” 

“Well,’* said Larry, “you tell it. What else is there 
to do?” 

Dick didn’t tell it, but Purdick did. 

“There was a warm current of air blowing through 



THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


150 

here before that stuff fell down and stopped the hole; 
we all noticed it. Maybe there is another way out, at 
the farther end of this thing.’’ 

'‘Say, that sounds like a piece of sure-enough common 
sense,” said Larry, jumping up. “Why didn’t we think 
of that before? Let’s try for it, anyhow, before we 
wear ourselves out with any more of the digging.” 

Suiting the action to the word, they clambered back 
over the pile of detritus they had heaped up and got the 
caravan in trail again. Whatever the cavern lacked in 
width—though now they found it wide enough in most 
places—it made up in length. For hours, as it seemed 
to them, they wandered on and on, sometimes along 
level passages, but oftener going down-hill. 

It was far past noon when they stopped to eat a bite of 
cold meat and bread left over from the breakfast cooking, 
and still there appeared to be no end to the crevice. 

“Good goodness! we must have come miles through 
this thing,” Dick exclaimed, munching a mouthful of the 
corn-bread sandwich. “If we have to go back and dig 
out the way we came in-” 

“Here’s hoping mighty hard that we won’t have to do 
that,” Larry interrupted. “How’s your hope, Purdy?” 

Purdick’s grin looked pale, but that was only because 
the candle light was poor. 

“I’m still betting on that warm wind that we felt when 
we first came in,” he said. “That came from outdoors 
somewhere; it must have.” 

“All right; let’s go find it,” said Larry, bolting his last 
mouthful; and the march into the black depths was re¬ 
sumed. 

Not for very long, however. A few hundred feet 



THE SPIDER’S WEB 


151 

beyond their halting place they came to an obstacle 
‘Tight,” as Dick named it. In a narrow passage which 
led to a much larger space beyond, a huge boulder had 
fallen in from above, leaving only a rat-hole, so to speak, 
between its bulk and one side of the tunnel; a space 
through which they could look, with the help of the 
candles, but through which not even little Purdick could 
squeeze himself. 

That brought on more talk; pretty serious talk. Dick 
was for turning back and making another desperate 
assault on the plug that Lop-Ear’s struggles had brought 
down, and his urgings would have prevailed had not Pur¬ 
dick, who was staring through the narrow slit ahead, 
this time without the aid of the candles, suddenly broke in. 

“Say, fellows! I believe I can see something like a 
glimmer of daylight ahead! Come here and look!” 

They all looked, putting the lighted candles well in the 
background. What they saw was hardly daylight; it was 
nothing more than a grayish sort of dusk. But they knew 
perfectly well that it must come from daylight some¬ 
where. 

“That answers the question for us,” said Larry defi¬ 
nitely. “We have the hammer and drills and dynamite. 
We can drill and blast this rock in less time than it will 
take us to go all the way back and dig out through that 
roof slide. What do you say?” 

They didn’t say, particularly. They got out the tools 
and fell to work. It turned out to be a most grueling 
job, drilling a shot hole in the big stone. There was 
hardly room in which to swing the hammer properly, 
and the one who was “striking” could keep it up for only 
a few minutes at a time. But the sight of the shadowy 


152 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


illummation beyond the obstacle kept them going, and 
they wouldn’t give up, didn’t give up or stop, only once 
for the evening meal, until they had the hole drilled well 
into the center of the boulder. 

Next came the loading and firing, and that, too, brought 
on more talk. They knew that the gases liberated by 
the exploding dynamite would, unless there were a venti¬ 
lating outlet somewhere beyond, fill the cavern and stifle 
them. By this time it was well on into the night, and it 
was Larry’s suggestion that they load the hole in readi¬ 
ness for firing, and leave it until morning. 

^‘We’re too tired to chew off any more excitement to¬ 
night,” was the way he put it; so they led the jacks back 
to one of the larger chambers where the peek-a-boo tor¬ 
rent, as Dick called it, took what appeared to be its final 
dive underground, moved their packs, and, unrolling the 
blankets, turned in on the hard floor to sleep as they could. 

It was half-past five in the morning when Larry’s self¬ 
tripping mental alarm clock went off, and he got up and 
roused his two companions. 

‘Time’s up,” he said. “Help me get the mules and the 
stuff a little farther back out of the way and we’ll shoot 
the moon.” 

They made their preparations for the big shot with 
some little trepidation. Dick, who, because his father 
was a mine owner as well as a railroad manager, knew 
the most about underground mining, was the mainstay 
of the other two. 

“We needn’t be nervous,” he said. “Half the time the 
miners don’t take the trouble to go back very far in a 
tunnel, even when they fire a whole round of blasts. 
What you do is to hold your mouth open and cover your 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 153 

ears with your hands. And with all these crookings 
there’s no fear of flying rocks.” 

When everything was as ready as they knew how to 
make it, Larry took the lighted candle and went to put 
fire to the fuse, which they had cut long enough to give 
the firer plenty of time to rejoin his companions. When 
he came back, the hand that held the candle was shaking 
a little, in spite of all he could do. “She’s going,” he 
announced, and then they blew the candles out and cow¬ 
ered against the nearest rock wall in the black darkness 
to wait for the shock. 

To all three it seemed as if the waiting interval would 
never end. Time, at such a crisis, moves as if it were 
leaden-winged. Dick had his mouth open, but he held 
his breath until he was about ready to burst. “Gracious!” 
he gasped, “did we cut that fuse a mile long?” 

If either Larry or Purdick made any reply there were 
no ears to hear it. The fire had reached the dynamite 
at last. There was a sucking blast of air that seemed to 
be trying to tear them loose and fling them back into the 
rearward depths, a noise that was like a collision of 
worlds, and then a sickening gust of the powder fumes 
to warn them not to be in too much of a hurry to run 
forward to see what the big blast had accomplished. 

They didn’t hurry. After a wait of about five minutes, 
Larry relighted his candle, and they waited again until 
the candle flame was burning brightly to show that the 
deadly fumes were dissipating. Then they crept forward 
cautiously. Around the last of the crooking turns in the 
passage they found a litter of broken rock, and they were 
almost afraid to look into the boulder nest. What if the 


154 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


shock had brought down the roof, and so trapped them 
more securely than ever? 

It was Dick who got the first look. '^Hooray!” he 
yelled. “We did it! She’s wide open—you could drive 
a wagon through!” 

In a hush of eager expectancy they pressed forward 
over the pile of shattered rock. Just beyond the place 
where the boulder had stopped the way, the cavern made 
an abrupt turn to the left, and at a little distance beyond 
the turn they came out into the blessed daylight at the 
mouth of what appeared to be marvelously like a man¬ 
made tunnel. 

Gasping and gulping down the fresh morning air into 
their gas-filled lungs, they stood for a moment in the 
tunnel mouth and looked around them. In the fore¬ 
ground there was a deep gulch, and the slope facing the 
tunnel and its backgrounding cliff looked singularly like 
a small mine dump. Purdick was staring down into the 
gorge as one suddenly transfixed. When he found speech 
it was to say, like a person talking in his sleep: “I remem¬ 
ber now, it was right down there that I found that piece 
of rotten quartz—the piece with the gold in it.” 

When he said that, Dick began to look around. A 
moment later he dragged Purdick and Larry back into 
the tunnel and pointed upward and outward. “Look!” 
he whispered, with awe in his voice. 

The tunnel mouth faced east, and the sun was just 
rising over the opposite mountain to shine full in upon 
them. In the jagged upper arch of the tunnel lip, un¬ 
touched, as it seemed, by the outrush of gases from the 
big blast, a spider’s web, a perfect wheel, was suspended, 
and at the hub of the wheel sat a great spider waiting for 


THE SPIDER’S WEB 


155 


its prey. And as the rays of the morning sun fell upon 
the web, the body of the spider hung like a drop of molten 
gold in a net of silver gossamer. Dick’s voice sank to 
less than a whisper. 

‘‘The golden spider!” he breathed. “Good goodness, 
fellows—are we awake, or just dreaming!” 


CHAPTER X 


NOTICE TO QUIT 

W HILE the three young prospectors, slandmg just 
within the mouth of the cliff crevice, stared at the 
spider-web with its eight-legged globule of molten gold 
hanging in the center, a small cloud drifted across the 
face of the rising sun and instantly the golden illusion 
vanished. The halo-like wheel of silken silver became 
just an ordinary spider-web, and the big spider changed 
its hue to a dusty brown. Dick drew a long breath. 

*Tt sure got me for a minute,” he said. *Tor about 
two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail I thought we were look¬ 
ing at old Jimmie Brock’s golden spider—thought we’d 
blundered into his lost mine by the back door.” 

‘'Well, see here,” said Larry, looking around curiously. 
“Are you right sure that we haven’t ?” 

“Of course we haven’t. That spider is only a coinci¬ 
dence. Uncle Billy didn’t say anything about the mine 
being in a cave.” 

Larry was holding the candle, which he had no? yet 
blown out, up to the side wall of the crevice. On the 
smooth surface of the rock there were marks; letters and 
words partly obliterated but still traceable. “Look 
here!” he called quickly; and this—filling in a missing 
letter or so here and there—was what they read: 

156 


NOTICE TO QUIT 
THE GOLDEN SPIDER LODE 


157 


THe undersigned claims sixty days to drive 
discovery tunnel and three months to record 
on this vein. 

James Brock, Discoverer. 

Dated October 16,-. 

The year number was effaced, but they knew that the 
hand that had scrawled this notice on the rock had been 
dead for nearly three years, so they could easily supply 
that. 

''For mercy’s sake!” gasped Dick; "old Jimmie’s 'dis¬ 
cover/ notice! It is the mine, after all. Talk about your 
miracles—why, great gracious! if that roof hadn’t hap¬ 
pened to tumble down back yonder and fairly made us 
come and look for some other way to get out-” 

"And to think that I was right here at the foot of this 
slide yesterday, and never once thought of its being a 
mine dump!” Purdick gulped. 

They all stepped out and looked down. The situation 
of the mine mouth, or cave mouth, was rather peculiar. 
The cliff which formed the western boundary of the gulch 
was not perpendicular; it was in steps or ledges; and the 
cave opening was on a level with one of these ledges, 
which was, perhaps, eight or ten feet wide in front of 
the cave mouth, forming a sort of dooryard to the open¬ 
ing. From that ledge to the steep slope below, there was 
a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet, and this had made 
a convenient dumping arrangement for the old prospec¬ 
tor. All he had had to do was to shove his waste diggings 
out to the edge of the ledge and let them drop. 




i 5B 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


Larry looked over the dumping edge at the heap of 
broken rock below. 

‘Tt isn’t any wonder you didn’t connect that pile of 
rock with this hole up here, Purdy,” he said. “It doesn’t 
look much like the ordinary mine dump.” 

“But whereabouts is the vein?” Dick demanded, and 
he was so excited that he could hardly talk straight. 

Turning back into the cave, they were not long in 
finding the lode of decomposed quartz. At a point in 
the natural cavern not more than a dozen feet from the 
entrance, another and smaller crevice branched off, pitch¬ 
ing up-hill at quite a sharp incline and stopping abruptly 
against a wall of rock at a little distance from its branch¬ 
ing point. In this pocket-like tunnel they came upon a 
worn shovel and a miner’s pick; a hammer with a broken 
handle, and three stubby rock drills: Brock’s tools, left 
behind when he had sallied out to begin the desperate 
struggle for life through the snows. The quartz vein 
itself was not over a foot wide, but it was exceedingly 
rich in spots—“lenses,” the mineralogists call them. Even 
by the poor light of their single candle the boys could 
see fine, wire-like threads of native gold here and there in 
the brown mass of the rotten quartz. 

For a little time they all lost their heads. It was such 
a bewildering, astounding thing that the lost mine, which 
they had all been regarding as more or less of a myth, 
so far as they were concerned, should turn up this way 
as a sequel to an adventure into which, as Dick had said, 
they had been fairly driven by the falling roof in the 
cave. 

“Great Land!” he ejaculated. “Think of this thing 
lying here unclaimed and unowned for nearly three long 


NOTICE TO QUIT 159 

years—and with probably dozens of people besides Uncle 
Billy looking for it! And think of the thousand and one 
chances we had of missing it! If our camp-fire hadn’t 
just happened to melt a hole in that ice a month ago; 
or if we hadn’t gone back yesterday to have a look at 
the cave; or if—oh, gee! there’s simply no end to the 
hfs’!” 

“I—I guess it just was to be,” said little Purdick, who 
was not half so much of a fatalist as this remark would 
seem to indicate. “We were just kicked into it, as you 
might say.” 

“Well,” Dick broke in, all a-nerve to get action of some 
sort, “what do we do, Larry? Can we post a notice, 
calling it our discovery, and hustle out to a land office 
and record it? Or do we have to stay here and do a lot 
of work on it before we can claim it in our names?” 

“I’m not enough of a mine lawyer to know,” Larry 
confessed. “The law says that the discoverer of a lode 
must either dig a shaft ten feet deep on it or, if he tunnels, 
his tunnel must go in far enough so that the vertical dis¬ 
tance from the heading to the surface outside must be 
ten feet or more. Brock was the discoverer, and he did 
more than the law requires, as we can easily see. But 
that was three years ago. Whether we, as re-locators, 
will have to begin all over again, I don’t know.” 

“That’s all right,” Dick put in; “in that case we’re not 
going to take any chances. We can stay here a week 
and still get out in time to start back to college; and we 
can do work enough in that time to satisfy the law if 
we get busy and don’t loaf on the job. We’ve dynamite 
enough left, luckily, and we can sharpen the drills the 
way we’ve been sharpening them—in a wood fire. Break- 


i6o THE GOLDEN SPIDER 

fast first, fellows; and after we get the jacks down to 
where they can feed, we'll go at it for blood!" 

This programme, or at least the first part of it, was 
agreed to and set in motion promptly. Going back into 
the crevice cave, they brought up the burros and packs, 
and, not to lose time gathering wood for a fire, they 
made coffee and broiled bacon over the last of the solidi¬ 
fied alcohol cooking candles. 

The breakfast was cooked and eaten just inside the 
mouth of the natural tunnel, and after they had finished 
the hasty meal, they all went out on the dump-head ledge 
to determine the best way of getting the burros down to 
some grazing ground where they could be picketed out. 

‘‘Say!" Dick exclaimed, looking over the mountain¬ 
scaling difficulties that presented themselves, 'fit's going 
to be some whale of a job getting the little beasties down 
there, if you’ll listen to what I’m telling you. And if 
we do get them down, they’ll stay down; we could never 
make ’em climb up here again in the wide world—^that’s 
a cinch." 

"That won’t make any difference. We wouldn’t want 
to get them back up here," Larry answered. "We’ll most 
likely want to camp in the gulch ourselves, as long as the 
weather holds good." 

During this little colloquy Purdick had stood aside. 
He was shading his eyes from the sun and looking the 
mountain-narrowed prospect over thoughtfully. 

"Well, I’ll be jiggered!’’ he broke in. "Don’t you 
know, we’ve actually come back to within a few hundred 
yards of the place where we camped night before last! 
When we ran that test on the piece of quartz that I 
found, we were almost right here at the Golden Spider! 


NOTICE TO QUIT i6i 

See that butte with a bald spot on top up yonder?’’— 
pointing to the right. *‘That lies right opposite the mouth 
of the little gulch where we made camp that night. Don’t 
you remember it?” 

Now that it was pointed out, they all remembered it. 
Also, Larry remembered something else. 

‘That isn’t all,” he said. “That clay-and-rock slide 
where I found the crutch prints must be right up above 
us somewhere. I remember, now, there was a broken 
cliff, just like this, lying below it.” 

This mention of the crutch prints made Purdick shade 
his eyes and look again. Dick and Larry went along the 
ledge a little way to the left to see if there were any 
practicable descent for the burros in that direction. 
When they came back they found that Purdick had Dick’s 
field-glass and was focusing it upon a point farther down 
the wooded gulch. 

“Seeing things, Purdy?” Dick asked jocularly. 

“I’m afraid I am,” was the low-toned reply. “Take 
the glass and hold it on the mouth of that little pocket 
ravine away down there to the left.” 

Dick took one glance—which was all that he needed. 

“Smoke!” he exclaimed. “Wood smoke—a camp¬ 
fire!” and he handed the glass to Larry. 

Larry looked long and earnestly. When he passed the 
glass back to Purdick, the good gray eyes were narrowing. 

“I guess that means trouble in chunks,” he announced 
soberly. “Of course, it may not be the crowd that has 
been camping on our trail all summer, but the chances 
are that it is. Those crutch tracks that I found were 
pointing down that way. Let’s get inside, out of sight, 
before they spot us.” 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


162 

In the shelter of the crevice cave they held an imme¬ 
diate council of war. After a little hurried talk it was 
decided that there were two courses open to them. They 
could post a re-location notice—for whatever effect that 
might have upon any one who should find the mine after 
they left it—and slip away quietly in the hope that the 
“jumpers” would follow them and so be drawn away 
from the vicinity; or- 

“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted, when Larry had 
got that far. “You said a while ago that you didn’t 
know what the law is about doing 'discovery’ work on 
re-locations of abandoned claims—which is what this one 
is. If we leave the mine without doing the proper amount 
of work on it, we lose it anyway, don’t we?” 

“I was coming to that,” Larry went on. “We can post 
a notice and map the location so that somebody else can 
find it. Then, when we get back to Brewster, your uncle 
can send somebody in to do the work, and make the proper 
record. Of course we’d take a chance doing that. If 
anybody should come along after we go away, and be 
dishonest enough to destroy our notice, we’d lose out.” 

“All right; that is one thing we can do,” said Purdick. 
“What’s the other?” 

Larry frowned and looked away at the forested moun¬ 
tain framed in the crevice opening. 

“The other is the surest thing, if we’ve got nerve 
enough to pull it off. If we quit on the job before it’s 
finished, any one of a dozen things may happen to knock 
us out. Maybe we can’t throw these fellows off the track 
so easily. If they’re keeping any kind of a lookout, 
they’ll be pretty sure to see us getting the jacks and our 
dunnage down from this perch. That would mean, of 



NOTICE TO QUIT 


163 

course, that they’d wait until we were out of the way, 
and then they’d come up here, find the mine, and ^jump’ 
it. They could do that, and get their claim recorded, 
long before we could get back to Brewster and send 
somebody in here to make our ownership stick.” 

'‘Well,” Dick cut in impatiently, "go on; what else can 
we do?” 

Larry shook his head. 

"The other thing is sort of scary. I’ll admit; or, any¬ 
way, it’s full of stumps that I don’t see any way to get 
over. It’s to stay right here and do the work that we 
meant to do, and stand them off if they come interfering 
with us: fight it out with ’em, I mean. They don’t 
know that we’ve got to hike out at the end of a week, and 
if we can put up a good bluff they may think we’re here 
to stay. Trouble is, we’ll be cooped up in here like rats in 
a trap. They’ll hear the dynamiting—can’t help hearing 
it—and we won’t dare show ourselves outside. Worse 
than that, the jacks will starve—and I’d rather starve 
myself than starve them.” 

To the keen surprise of the two others it was little 
Purdick, pale but determined, who rose first to the de¬ 
mands of the occasion. 

"I vote to stay and hang on and fight it out,” he said, 
and if his voice were a bit husky it wasn’t from fear. 
"If we let go—but we just mustn’t let go, that’s all! 
I’m not saying this because I need the money worse than 
you two do: for that matter, I think the mine ought to 
belong to Mr. Starbuck, anyway. But for us to sneak 
out and leave it to a wide-open chance, after we’ve found 
it . . . You know your uncle, Dick, and I hardly know 
him at all; but I’m sure he’ll think mighty small of us 


164 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


if we go back and tell him that we fpund the Golden 
Spider and didn’t have sand enough to stay and hold on 
to it.” 

Dick popnded the small one on the back’. 

‘^You’re the right old stuff, Purdy—you sure are!” he 
broke out heartily, and then he chuckled: *'And you’re 
the one who said a little while back that you’d be no good 
in a scrap! I’m with you, right from the jump, and I 
know Larry is, too. Let’s get busy. We don’t even 
know that that smoke down yonder means anything more 
than some harmless old prospector’s cooking fire; and if 
it does mean anything else, we’re not exactly babies to let 
somebody take our candy away from us without raising 
a squawk. Let’s have a look at the drills, Larry, and see 
if they’re usable.” 

That settled it, of course. But there were still some 
knotty details to be worked out. 

*‘We’ve got grub enough, and we can get water by 
going back in the cave to where the torrent disappears,” 
Larry said. “But we’ve got to have fire, and for the 
fire we must have fuel. It strikes me that our first job— 
before these hold-ups get wind of us—is to get in a good 
supply of wood, and at the same time see if we can’t find 
something for the jacks to eat.” 

Not to lose any of the time which had suddenly become 
precious, they fell to work at once. First, they clambered 
down to the gulch level, taking the axe and the guns with 
them. In a series of little glades along the small torrent 
which drained the deep ravine they found plenty of 
grass, but as they had nothing but their pocket-knives 
with which to cut it, they found it was going to take a 
good while to harvest enough to amount to anything. 


NOTICE TO QUIT 165 

After a bit, they gave up trying to haggle it off with the 
knives and took to pulling it up by the roots, and in this 
way they soon gathered quite a quantity. 

Hurrying as fast as they could, and half expecting 
every moment to be interrupted, they rushed the pile of 
green hay over to the ledge foot by armfuls, and with 
two of them on the ledge to hoist, and one at the bottom 
to load the picket-rope sling, they shortly had the jack- 
feed stored in the crevice. 

That done, they flung themselves upon the job of 
wood gathering. This took more time, and was a lot 
harder work; but in a couple of hours they had accumu¬ 
lated a fairly good stock of fuel, dragging it up the ledge 
precipice as they had the grass, an armful at a time in 
the rope sling. 

Though they worked like salvagers at a fire, the job of 
getting ready to stand a siege cut deeply into the fore¬ 
noon, but still they neither heard nor saw anything of 
the men they were momently expecting to have to deal 
with. It was not until after they were preparing to begin 
work in the gold vein that Larry hit upon the probable 
reason for their immunity thus far. 

‘^Here’s my guess,” he offered. “We have fairly good 
proof that they’ve been trailing us from day to day, and 
it’s been easy because we haven’t tried to cover up our 
tracks. Their permanent camp is probably down yonder 
where we saw that smoke, and some one of the three has 
chased out to see where we went yesterday. He’d have 
no trouble in tracking us up to the place where we began 
to burrow in the ground.” 

Dick chuckled. 

“No trouble up to that point, but a whole lot of it 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


166 

afterward. Do you think he could track us into the 
crevice?” 

Larry shook his head. 'T don’t know. I suppose he 
could, if he’s any kind of a tracker. But when he comes 
to the place where the roof fell down, he’ll quit and go 
back; you can bet on that.” 

*^Gee!” said Dick, ^hf this gold vein were only a little 
farther back in the cave, where we could drill and blast 
without being heard from the outside, we’d be as safe as 
a clock. Nobody would ever think of looking down here 
for the outlet to that crack away yonder up the moun¬ 
tain.” 

^‘You can’t tell,” Larry demurred; and then: ^‘You’re 
right about the drilling and blasting, though. We 
needn’t think we’re going to be able to do any great 
amount of mining in here without being found out, if 
there’s anybody around who wants to find out. That 
being the case, we’ve got to watch out sharp. We’ll work 
changing shifts in the heading; two on and one off; and 
the man that’s resting can stand guard at the cave 
mouth.” 

While Larry was sharpening the drills, with a flat stone 
for an anvil, and with Purdick working the bicycle- 
pump blower for him, Dick moved the green hay back to 
the enlargement of the crevice where they were keeping 
the burros, and piled the stock of wood where it would 
be out of the way. Next the question of spoil disposal 
came up. What were they to do with the broken rock 
and vein matter as they blasted it out? 

“There is one sure thing,” Larry said. “That stuff 
is too rich to be thrown out on the dump. We’ll have to 
pile our diggings here in the cave and sort the ore by 


167 


NOTICE TO QUIT 

hand the best way we can. It would be like throwing 
twenty-dollar gold pieces away to pitch it into the gulch.” 

“You said a mouthful, that time,” Dick agreed. “But 
it will clutter us up awfully if we have to pile the spoil 
in here.” 

“We can sort it, as I say,” Larry pointed out, “saving 
only the vein matter and shoveling the barren rock out 
over the ledge. But we won’t do that until we’re sure 
we’re not going to be molested. When we begin making 
a fresh dump outside, that will be telling anybody that 
may happen along just what we’re doing in here. And 
if we don’t do the sorting mighty carefully one look at 
the dump will tell any prospector that we’re working a 
quartz gold vein. We want to keep this thing quiet, if 
we can. Saying nothing about the three hold-ups, it 
would be a fierce temptation for anybody to 'jump’ it 
after we’re gone—take down our notice and throw it 
away and pretend that the place was an abandoned claim.” 

“But nobody could make a barefaced robbery like that 
hold in law,” Purdick protested. 

Dick smiled grimly. 

“If you had lived in a mining country as long as Larry 
and I have, you’d know that a law-suit over a mine is 
about the last thing in the world that any peaceable per¬ 
son wants to get mixed up in, Purdy. When you once 
begin, there’s simply no end to it. You see, there’s no 
way of getting any real proof that will satisfy a judge 
and jury. We might swear that we discovered this vein 
on a certain date and posted our notice. Then the other 
fellow would get up and swear that he had discovered it 
at an earlier date and posted his notice. So there you 


are. 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


168 

‘^Let’s be doing,” Larry broke in; and he and Purdick 
went into Janies Brock’s tunnel and began drilling the 
holes for the first round of blasts, while Dick, with his 
rifle across his knees, took the first guard watch, sitting 
at the crevice mouth and looking down into the gulch 
through which any intruder must approach. 

As the short shifts were planned, each one of the three 
had an hour on and a half-hour off, the watcher taking 
the place of one of the two in the heading at the end of 
each thirty minutes. Nothing happened during Dick’s 
half-hour at the cave mouth. The faint smoke wreath 
that had been distinguishable in the early morning over 
the little ravine farther down the gulch had disappeared, 
and the stillness of the mountain immensities brooded 
over the scene. Carefully and at frequent intervals Dick 
swept the surroundings with the field-glass, but therd 
was nothing to indicate that there was a human being, or, 
indeed, any living thing, within miles of his sentry-box 
on the face of the broken cliff. 

At the end of one shift all around they knocked off 
for dinner. The fire had been kept going, and Purdick 
made up and cooked enough pan-bread to last for a 
couple of days. 

‘That’s because we’ve got to go light on our wood 
pile,” he said. “It’s too much hard work to get the stuff 
up here.” Then to Larry, who had had the last half- 
hour at the cave’s mouth: “Anything stirring outside ?” 

“Nothing. We might be the only people between the 
two ranges of the Hophras, so far as any sign of life 
in the gulch goes.” 

“But we know pretty well we’re not,” Dick put in, 
making himself a sandwich of bacon and hot pan-bread. 


NOTICE TO QUIT 169 

‘TVe been figuring and calculating on about how long it 
would take a man to climb from the gulch to the place 
where we ducked into the cave, find out all there is to 
be found out there, and get back, ^hat do you say, 
Larry 

Larry laughed. ‘‘Anybody’s guess is as good as mine. 
But that doesn’t cut any figure. If their camp is down 
yonder where we saw that smoke this morning, and there 
is anybody left in it, our first round of blasts will give 
us away. They can’t miss hearing the dynamite at that 
distance.” 

“What will they do?” Dick asked. 

“You tell—if you know,” Larry returned. 

Dick nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too. 
Of course, they can climb up on the ledge at the place 
around to the left where we shinned up and down—that 
is, the two with good legs can. But will they take a 
chance on doing that?” 

“A chance of getting shot, you mean? I don’t think 
they’ll be much afraid of that. They’re taking us for a 
bunch of kids—what Burdick heard over there in Lost 
Canyon proves that—and they’ll probably think they can 
scare us off.” 

“That brings it right down to brass tacks,” said Dick. 
“I think we ought to make up our minds just what we’re 
going to do if the pinch comes. I’ll say, right now, that 
I’m not much good with a rifle. If I should shoot and 
try to cripple one of ’em, just as likely as not my hand 
would shake and I’d kill him. And I wouldn’t want to 
kill the worst scamp in the world unless I was sure it was 
the only way to save my own life.” 

“I guess we all feel pretty much the same way,” Larry 


170 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


put in. ‘^And I’ll have to admit that I’m with you on 
the poor marksmanship proposition, too, Dick. You 
know how it was last summer when Bob Goldrick used 
to give us an afternoon off in the Tourmaline arid let us 
take his rifle for target practice.” 

‘T sure do,” said Dick, with a sheepish grin. ‘‘Seemed 
as if neither one of us could hit the side of a barn.” 

It was just here that little Purdick surprised his two 
camp-mates for the second time in one day. 

“I can shoot, and shoot straight,” he slipped in quietly. 

“You?” queried Dick. “How did you ever learn to 
handle a gun—in a rolling-mill town?” 

Purdick’s smile was reminiscent of some pretty hard 
times in the past. 

“I’ve done mighty nearly everything in the world to 
earn a living, first and last, as both of you know,” he 
explained. “One summer I helped in a shooting-gallery, 
and when business was slack the boss let me practice. 
When he found out that I had a sort of good eye for it, 
he’d make me go out in front and start the game—just 
to show customers how easy it was to make bull’s-eyes. 
It is easy, too, after you get the knack of it.” 

“You’re elected,” said Dick; “that is, if you don’t mind 
being the goat.” 

Purdick’s smile broadened into a grin. 

“You fellows will have to call the shots—say where 
you want ’em placed. That’ll put the responsibility on 
you.” 

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they 
made ready to fire the first round of blasts on the gold 
vein. Larry, the careful one of the three, did the fuse 
fixing and tamping of the holes, and when all was ready 


NOTICE TO QUIT 


171 

he applied the match and they all retreated to safety in 
the upper part of the natural cavern. There was the 
usual thunder burst of noise, or rather four of them com¬ 
ing in quick succession, the queer sensation which every 
deep-shaft miner knows; a feeling as if one’s neck were 
suddenly pulled out to goose-neck length and then snapped 
back like a retracting rubber band; the rush of com¬ 
pressed air forced inward by the expanding gases, fol¬ 
lowed by the suction of the reaction; and the thing was 
over. 

Having had considerable experience with dynamite 
during the summer, they waited for the air to clear. As 
soon as it became breathable, they crept forward to see 
what the explosive had done. The round of shots was 
a handsome success. The little tunnel was filled with 
the broken rock and vein matter, and the heading, or 
tunnel end, had been advanced the length of the deepest 
drill hole. 

^‘That’s business,” said Dick. “We can walk her back 
into the hill any old distance we want to—give us time. 
Now let’s see if the racket has stirred up anything excit¬ 
ing on the outside.” 

Apparently it hadn’t. Looking out of the cave mouth, 
they saw no change in the surroundings; no indication 
that there had been any ears but their own to hear the 
roar of the dynamite. Dick wanted to go to work at 
once, clearing away and sorting the ore thrown down 
while there was still daylight enough to enable them to 
see, but Larry counseled patience. 

“Let’s give those sneak thieves time enough to come, 
if they’re going to come,” he advised, so they all three 
stood guard at the mouth of the cave for a full quarter 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


172 

of an hour, six eager eyes searching every detail of the 
gulch for signs of an approaching enemy and finding 
none at all. 

‘Talse alarm,said Dick at last. ‘We’d better get 
busy before we have to light candles to see by. With the 
sun over behind the mountain, it’s going to get dark early 
in this hole.” 

Not to miss any of the precautions they had so firmly 
agreed upon, it was decided that two of them should 
sort the ore from the rock while the other stood guard 
at the crevice mouth. This arrangement functioned all 
right until Dick, who was one of the two sorters, began 
to go into hilarious ecstasies over the prodigious richness 
of some of the “lenses” that had been shot down, shat¬ 
tered bits of the rotten quartz held together by wire-like 
lacings of native gold. After a time, his ravings got to 
be too much even for Larry, who was doing the guard 
stunt. Again and again he was tempted away from his 
place at the cave mouth by Dick’s, “Oh, gee-whiz, Larry! 
Duck in here just for a second and see this piece! There 
never was anything like it in this world 1” 

And then—for the fifth or sixth time Larry had dodged 
back from his post at Dick’s call, and all three of them 
had their heads together over the most beautiful of all 
the specimens that had yet been dug out of the heap of 
shattered rock. Suddenly the waning daylight sifting in 
through the narrow crevice entrance was cut off, and a 
raucous voice bellowed: 

“Say 1 What the blazes are youse fellows doin’ in our 
mine, I’d like to know? Climb down out o’ this, the 
bunch 0’ yuh, afore I drill yuh so full o’ holes that your 
own mothers won’t know yuh!” 


CHAPTER XI 


FINDERS KEEPERS 

A t the summons for which they had heen looking— 
and hadn’t looked judiciously enough—the three 
Golden Spiders, kneeling beside the partly sorted pile of 
ore and broken stone, were taken at a tremendous dis¬ 
advantage. Larry’s rifle was the only one within reach, 
and this had been put down while he was handling the 
piece of rich ore that Dick had thrust at him. 

The intruder, a heavily built man with a swarthy face, 
ragged black mustaches and a beard that looked as if it 
might be a month past its last shave, had apparently come 
well prepared to enforce the notice to quit. He carried a 
rifle in the crook of his arm, and there was a formidable- 
looking pistol sagging in its holster on his right hip. 

Dick was the first to get upon his feet, and what he 
said was no measure at all of the scare that was gripping 
him inside. 

'‘You say this is your mine? I g-guess you’ll have to 
prove that before you can run us off,” he blurted out. 

“Prove nothin’!” retorted the invader with an ugly 
rasp in his voice. “Me and my pardners was pardners 
with old Jim Brock when he worked the ’sessment on 
this here claim. You fellers pack up and git out whilst 
yuh can do it with whole skins. Git a move, I say!” 

Up to this point little Purdick was the only one who 

173 


174 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


was doing any moving. Being behind Dick and Larry, 
and also having the pile of shot-down rock for partial 
concealment, he was trying by slow inchings to get hold 
of Larry’s gun. He knew it would probably be quick 
suicide for Larry to turn around and try to pick it up, 
but he thought that he—Purdick—might be able to get 
it if Dick would only go on arguing with the big hold-up 
and so gain a little time. Dick didn’t disappoint him. 
Arguing was the thing Dickie Maxwell did best. 

‘^But see here,” he contended, facing the big man 
boldly; “you can’t chase us out this way. If you’ve got 
a legal right to this claim, all you have to do is to go into 
court and prove it and we’ll give up. But-” 

“There ain’t no Tuts’ about it!” roared the swarthy 
desperado, loosening the big revolver in its sheath. “I 
ain’t honin’ to commit no murder, but if yuh git me 
madded—pass me them guns, butt foremost, and then git 
yer traps and pile out o’ here, and do it mighty sudden, 
’r I’ll blow yuh to kingdom come!” 

Again little Purdick was the only one who moved. 
All his efforts to reach Larry’s gun without being caught 
at it failed. Six inches was as near as he could come to 
touching it. But the small one was blest with a brain 
that could shuttle at the rate of a mile a minute under 
pressure, and all the time he was reaching for the rifle, he 
was trying his hardest to think of some other expedient 
that would rid them of the intruder. 

It was the desperado’s final threat that gave Purdick 
the bright idea—that “blow yuh to kingdom come.” The 
daylight was fading fast, and with it Purdick faded, 
backing out of the scene noiselessly and taking scrupu¬ 
lous care to keep himself in line with Dick and the shelter- 




FINDERS KEEPERS 


175 


ing rock pile. When he had crept to where the jack 
packs were lying, it seemed as if it took him an endless 
time to find what he wanted, and his hands were shaking 
so that they fumbled helplessly in the dark. Around the 
turn in the crevice he could hear Dick still trying to 
argue, with the hold-up breaking in to curse and swear 
and threaten all sorts of hideous things that were going 
to happen when he got sufficiently “madded.” 

Purdick’s hurried preparations were finished at last, 
and with trembling fingers he struck a match and held 
the flame to the frayed end of what looked in the match- 
light to be a length of thick, blackish string. The next 
moment he had darted around the sheltering turn in the 
crevice to fling a yellow cylindrical object at the feet of 
the intruder—a paper-covered cylinder with a spitting, 
fizzing, black string hanging out of it. 

”Dynamite r he yelled, and with the yell grabbed 
Dick’s collar with one hand and Larry’s with the other, 
and in a burst of strength that would have been miles 
beyond him a few short weeks earlier, dragged them both 
headlong over the rock pile and behind it, falling flat on 
top of them to hold them down. 

It worked. There was a deafening explosion a few 
seconds later, but there was no intruder in sight to be 
blown up by it. Instantly, Purdick leaped to his feet, 
caught up Larry’s rifle and ran to the cave mouth. The 
dooryard ledge was empty, but a great crashing in the 
young trees below told what had become of the man with 
the large threats and the small self-control in an emer¬ 
gency. Having escaped the dynamite, he was doing his 
best to get out of rifle range. 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


176 

Larry was the first to speak when he and Dick joined 
Purdick at the cave entrance. 

“We sure had it coming to us—or I did, anyway. I 
'white-eyed’ on my lookout job. I had no business to go 
gold-crazy just because you did, Dick.” Then to Pur¬ 
dick: “You bully little old fighting rat—how did you 
come to think of the dynamite?” 

“He put it into my head by saying what he did about 
blowing us all up if we didn’t get out. But I had an 
awful time fixing the cartridge in the dark. I was scared 
stiff for fear I’d leave too much of the stuff in the paper 
and kill us all.” 

“Then you didn’t use a whole stick?” Dick asked. 

“Good land—no! I guess we wouldn’t be here if I had. 
I took it all out but just a little, and filled the paper up 
with sand to make it look like a whole stick. I thought 
probably that just the look of it would crack his nerve, 
and it did.” 

“Well,” said Larry, with a hunch of his broad shoul¬ 
ders, “we know where we’re 'at’ now, at least. We’ve 
got to stick and fight it out, after this, whether we want 
to or not.” 

“You bet we’ll stick,” Dick asserted; and then: “The 
cold nerve of that outfit! Just plain hold-ups, as we’ve 
been saying they were. Now there’s this about it: we 
can’t afford to be chicken-hearted with toughs like they 
are. I more than half believe they’d shoot, and shoot 
to kill, if they thought that was the only way to get rid 
of us.” 

“All right,” Purdick put in quietly. “We can shoot, 
too, if we have to. You fellows go in and go on with 
the ore sorting. I’ll be doorman for a while.” 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


177 


Since it was now nearly evening, with little daylight 
in the crevice, Dick lighted a candle and the ore sorting 
was continued. Purdick sat down with his rifle between 
his knees and got what satisfaction he could out of a 
reversed and very beautiful sunset. The sun had gone 
behind the great range at his back, and the gulch and 
its tributary ravines were slowly filling with a rising tide 
of dusky blue that was like a mist, only in the high alti¬ 
tudes it isn’t a mist; it is just pure color. But it was 
only in the shadow that the colors were subdued. In the 
upper air the sunlight was still streaming in a gorgeous 
flood, crimsoning the few high clouds and setting the 
distant peaks of the eastern Hophras aglow with a pink¬ 
ish fire. 

Full of hardship as his life had been, Purdick had a 
keen sense of the beautiful in nature, and again and again 
he had to remind himself that he was doing guard duty, 
and that the siege of the Golden Spider had now fairly 
begun. What would be the next move on the part of the 
three men who were trying to steal the mine? Would 
they try force again? Or would they- 

Purdick grew very thoughtful when the alternative sug¬ 
gested itself. If the would-be robbers had been spying 
thoroughly enough, they must know that the cave was not 
provisioned for a long siege; that in a few days at farthest 
hunger would do what their first attempt at force had 
failed to do. Then there were the burros. They could 
live for a little while on the grass that was stored in the 
cave, and after that they could starve for a few days 
longer. But the end must come shortly, even for the 
tough little animals. 

Little Purdick was in the midst of these ominous cogi- 



178 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


tations when he saw a red flash down among the trees in 
the gulch bottom to the left, something smacked like a 
pair of clapped hands a few feet over his head, and on 
the heels of that came the rattling echoes of a rifle shot. 
Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised his rifle, aimed 
it at the spot where he had seen the flash, and fired. At 
the double crack of the guns, distant and near, Dick and 
Larry came running. 

“What was it, Purdy?” Dick demanded. 

“Nothing much. Somebody down there took a crack 
at me, and I handed it back.” 

“Did you hit him?” Larry wanted to know. 

“I couldn’t tell, of course. I fired at the place where I 
saw the flash. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to let 
them know that we’re on the job. Stand back a little. 
They may shoot again.” 

They waited in silence for a time, but there were no 
more shots. After a time a reddish glow appearing among 
the trees far down the gulch told them that the raiders’ 
supper camp-fire had been lighted. 

“I guess that ends it for a while, anyway,” Larry com¬ 
mented. “They’ll hardly try to rush us in the dark.” 

“That may be,” Dick allowed. “Just the same there 
mustn’t be any more cat-napping on sentry post for us. 
They mean business. They’ve spent a whole summer 
chasing us all over the lot, and they’re not going to let go 
now, with the big prize fairly in sight.” 

After supper, which was eaten at the mouth of the 
cave where they could keep watch, they made their dis¬ 
positions for the night. There was a bed of dry wash 
sand back in the cavern, and they shovelled enough of 
this out to the entrance corridor to pad the bare rock 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


179 


floor for a makeshift bed. Purdick took the first watch, 
and when he called Dick a little before midnight, there 
was nothing to report. Dick, the easy-going, comfort- 
loving member of the trio, found it pretty hard work 
keeping awake, with no fire and not much chance to stir 
around, but he managed to stick it out until three o’clock, 
when he roused Larry. 

“Nothing doing,” he said in low tones so as not to 
waken Purdick. “I could see the glow of their fire a 
little when I first came on, but that’s gone down now. I 
don’t believe we’re going to hear anything more from 
them before daylight.” 

His prediction proved true. Larry sat through the 
long hours of early-morning darkness and heard nothing, 
saw nothing until the breaking dawn showed him a column 
of smoke rising above the distant pocket gulch to the left. 
Larry thought he was safe to go back into the cave and 
start the breakfast fire, and he did it, though he would 
not risk leaving his post long enough to go after the 
coffee water which could only be obtained by carrying it 
from the disappearing stream beyond the place where 
they had blasted the big boulder. 

The crackling of the fire roused Purdick, and he sat 
up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. 

“Anything startling?” he asked. 

Larry shook his head. “Nothing yet. They’re getting 
breakfast, I suppose. Their fire’s going, anyhow.” 

Purdick unwound himself from his blankets. 

“Good example they’re setting us. We’ll do like¬ 
wise.” And he got up to go after the water and fry 
the bacon. 

They ate as they did the night before, sitting at the 


i8o 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


cavern mouth where they could see the gulch in both 
directions. Immediately after breakfast the ore sorting 
was resumed, with Purdick on watch under a new spider 
web which had been spun during the night. For an 
hour or more Dick and Larry pawed over the heap of 
broken rock, picking out the brown vein matter and piling 
it on one side, and leaving the barren rock to be shovelled 
out to the entrance and over the edge of the dooryard 
cliff. 

It was not until they began getting rid of the rock 
that hostilities opened up. Purdick, who was still on 
watch, had neither seen nor heard anything moving in 
the gulch below, but as Larry ran the first shovelful of 
stone out to the dumping edge, a rifle clanged somewhere 
in the woods and a bullet spatted against the cliff a foot 
or so from the cave mouth. Purdick was ready, but 
there was nothing to shoot at. A gun flash doesn’t show 
in the daylight, and the powder in a modern high-powered 
rifle cartridge doesn’t make much smoke; not enough 
so that a single discharge is visible at any great distance. 

''So that’s the game, is it?” Larry growled, ducking 
to cover before a second shot could be fired. "We’re not 
to be allowed to go out on our own doorstep. All right; 
here’s the answer,” and, standing in the cave passage 
where he couldn’t be seen from the gulch, he got rid of 
the spoil by pitching it, a shovelful at a time, into the 
depths below. The dooryard ledge was only about ten 
feet wide, and the shovel throw across it was compara¬ 
tively easy. 

With the working ground cleared, the drilling for an¬ 
other series of blasts was begun, the routine of the pre¬ 
vious day being followed; that is, half-hour shifts all 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


i8i 


around, with two of them striking and drill-holding in 
the tunnel heading and the other on watch. Larry had 
the first half-hour at the cave mouth, and during that 
time a number of shots were fired from the gulch. They 
did no harm. The upward angle was so great that the 
few bullets well enough aimed to enter the crevice did 
nothing worse than to knock a splinter of stone from 
the roof now and then. At first, these leaden invitations 
to quit were a good bit unnerving, but they soon learned 
that the way to let the enemy know that he wasn’t accom¬ 
plishing anything was to keep the ping-ping of the strik¬ 
ing hammer going steadily, and in a short time the useless 
bombardment stopped. 

By noon they were ready to fire another round of blasts 
in the tunnel, and they did it, retreating as before into 
the depths of the cave, in the confident assurance that 
the sputtering fuses would be a sufficient protection 
against an invasion for the few minutes they would have 
to leave the cave mouth unguarded. The roar of the 
blasts followed quickly, and after the gas had been given 
time to dissipate itself, the sorting process began again, 
this time with Dick doing guard duty. 

“I don’t see but what we can keep this thing up indefi¬ 
nitely, as long as our grub lasts,” Dick said, as he took 
his place as sentry. ‘‘This old cave is as safe as a fort. 
They can’t possibly rush us, so long as we keep watch 
and are ready for them.” 

*Tt’s a matter of brains,” Larry offered. ‘They’re a 
poor lot if they can’t think up something better than any¬ 
thing they’ve tried yet.” 

The words were hardly out of his mouth before they 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


182 

all heard what sounded like the rumble of a distant ex¬ 
plosion. 

“What was that?” Purdick demanded, and as he spoke 
the answer came, first in an avalanche of earth and 
small stones rattling down from above upon their “door- 
yard” ledge, and an instant later in the thunderous fall 
of a huge boulder that, striking fairly upon the ledge, 
bit a huge scallop out of it exactly in front of the cave 
entrance as it went grinding and crashing on into the 
gulch, mowing down big trees in its path as if they were 
dry weed stalks. 

At the first rattling warning, Dick had thrown him¬ 
self back into the crevice, and it was well that he did so, 
for the impact of the mighty projectile upon the ledge 
was ^ike the explosion of an enormous shell, sending 
flying fragments of stone in all directions. 

“Speaking of brains,” Dick gasped, when he could get 
his breath, “I guess they’ve got a few right along with 
’em. Gorry! They must have shot a whole mountain 
down on us! Our dooryard’s gone, clear up to the hilt!” 

Dick’s announcement was no exaggeration. Where 
there had been a step-like ledge and a straight drop from 
the edge of it, there was now a great gash and a steep 
slope running quite up to the cave mouth. And the pro¬ 
tection which the projecting ledge had given them from 
rifle Are from below was gone. A good marksman in 
the gulch could now shoot directly into the crevice, still 
at a high angle, to be sure, but not so high but that the 
bullets could penetrate for a dozen feet or more before 
they would hit the roof. 

While the avalanche aftermath of little stones and 
earth was still clattering down from the cliff brink above, 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


183 


the bombardment was renewed. Every few minutes, at 
the crack of a gun in the gulch, a whining missile would 
come through the exposed crevice mouth to hit the roof 
and scatter stone splinters and bits of hot lead all about 
the place. 

‘WelV^ said Dick, after they had quickly withdrawn 
out of the line of fire, ‘Vhat next?” 

“More of the same,” gritted Larry the stubborn. 
“We’re not dead yet. Get back on the sentry job, Dick, 
and Purdy and I will shovel this stuff out of the way 
and get ready for another go at the drilling. We won’t 
stop to do any more sorting just now.” 

Carrying out this programme, it was only a short time 
until the cheerful ping-ping of the hammer upon steel 
began to sound again in the vein tunnel, and, as before, 
the work noises stopped the firing from below. Dick was 
chuckling triumphantly when, at the end of his half- 
hour, he went up into the tunnel to swap jobs with 
Purdick. 

“You’ve got the combination on ’em, Larry,” he re¬ 
marked. “Letting them know that they’re not stopping 
us, I mean. They’ll have to think up something differ¬ 
ent, now.” 

If they were thinking, the determined mine “jumpers” 
seemed to be taking it leisurely. The afternoon passed 
without any more warlike demonstrations, and by the 
time the growing dusk was beginning to thicken in the 
gulch the drillers had another round of blasts ready to 
be fired the first thing the next morning. 

“Llave they given it up and gone away, do you sup¬ 
pose?” Purdick asked, after the supper had been dished 


184 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


up and they were eating with appetites untouched by the 
exciting happenings of the day. 

‘‘Nothing like that,” Larry asserted. “They’ll hit us 
again—don’t make any mistake about that.” 

“What will they try next?” Dick wanted to know. 

“Huh!” said Larry. “If I knew I’d be hustling around 
to get ready for it.” 

“Seems to me it’s leaning our way yet,” Dick offered. 
“They’ve found they can’t scare us out, or shoot us out, 
or avalanche us out, and, as I said this morning, they can’t 
rush us when there are only three of them, and one of the 
three a cripple. For that matter, they’ve made the rush¬ 
ing business harder now than it was before. With our 
door-yard gone, the only way for them to charge would 
be right up the smashed-out slope, and it would take a 
lot of nerve to do that when they know that there are 
three rifles here at the top.” 

“There is one way, if they only think of it,” Purdick 
offered. “They can starve us out in a few days. Maybe 
that is what they’ve made up their minds to do now. 
They don’t seem to be doing anything else.” 

The suspicious quiet held out until late in the evening, 
up to the moment when Dick and Purdick were prepar¬ 
ing fresh sand beds on the floor of the cave mouth, while 
Larry sat with his gun between his knees at the edge of 
the newly made avalanche gash. Then, out of the dark¬ 
ness either to the right or left, Larry could not tell which, 
came a harsh voice saying: “Hey! Youse fellies in th’ 
hole!” 

“All right,” Larry called out, bringing his gun up to 
the “ready.” “Spit it out. What have you got to say?” 

“Just what my pardner said last night!” rasped the 


FINDERS KEEPERS 185 

voice. *‘YeVe to take yer traps and clear out o’ that 
mine!” 

Purdick and Dick were listening with Larry, and Pur- 
dick whispered: “It’s the cripple—^Twisty,’ they called 
him—that’s talking. I’d know his voice anywhere.” 

“Why should we clear out?” Larry asked. “It’s our 
discovery. You didn’t know anything about this place 
until you heard us at work in here.” 

“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. We’re old Jim 
Brock’s pardners, and the mine belongs to us!” 

“You needn’t take the trouble to hand out that line of 
talk,” Larry flung back. “One of your partners gave us 
that fairy tale last night. We know all about you fel¬ 
lows. You’ve been following us around all summer be¬ 
cause you didn’t know where James Brock’s abandoned 
mine was, and you thought we did know. We didn’t 
know, any more than you did; but now that we’ve found 
it, we’re going to keep it.” 

There was a short silence to follow this, and Purdick 
whispered again: “Whereabouts is he?” 

Larry whispered back: “I don’t know, but I think he’s 
around to the left where we climbed up and down yes¬ 
terday morning.” 

“Keep back a little,” Purdick warned. “If he gets you 
in range, he’ll shoot, just as like as not.” 

At the end of the little silence the raucous voice began 
again. 

“Ye’ll not keep it long—not any longer than it’ll take 
the sheriff to get in here fr’m Natrolia.” 

“Huh!” Larry snorted. “The sheriff hasn’t got any¬ 
thing to do with us!” 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


186 

‘^Yuh’ll see when he gets here. Ye’re jumpin’ our 
mine.” 

“Nothing doing,” said Larry. “I don’t know where 
you are, but wherever it is, you can stay there and talk 
foolishness all night if you want to. It won’t get you 
anywhere, though.” 

Another silence, and then: 

“Listen: ye’re nothin’ but a bunch o’ kids, and ye don’t 
know what ye’re up ag’inst. You don’t want to make 
this a fight for blood, because if ye do, there’s only the 
one way it can end. Ye’re in there, and if we give the 
word, yuh’ll never come out alive.” 

It was here that Dick, who seldom consented to be a 
permanent listener in any conversation, chipped in. 

“Lots of good it’ll do you to kill us off!” he snapped 
back. “You talk as if there wouldn’t be any hereafter 
to this thing! James Brock gave this mine to my Uncle 
Billy Starbuck, and you know it because you listened in 
that morning in Brewster and heard Uncle Billy telling 
us about it. Suppose you do turn in and murder us: 
how long do you think it would be before half of Brew- 
ster’d be over here looking for you three fellows with a 
rope ?” 

“We’re takin’ chances on that,” was the short reply. 
“And listen—here’s the last word. You get out o’ that 
hole, and do it before mornin’, if yuh ever want to see 
Brewster ag’in. D’yuh get that ?” 

“We hear what you say,” Larry answered. 

“Well, here’s my affidavy!” yapped the voice in the 
darkness, and a rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed past 
the cave mouth so near that Larry said he felt the wind 
of it—as he probably did. 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


187 


'^Give me elbow room!” grated little Purdick, pressing 
forward with his gun, and leaning out past Larry. But 
the would-be assassin was too wary to betray his where¬ 
abouts, and though they waited breathlessly for many 
minutes with all their five senses concentrated in the 
listening nerve, they were not able to catch the slightest 
sound to betray the manner or direction of his retreat. 

“Well,” said Larry, at the end of the breathless inter¬ 
val, “that fellow said that we didn’t know what we were 
up against, but I guess we do. I don’t believe he was 
bluffing, though maybe he was.” 

“Not on your life!” Dick exclaimed. “The gold vein 
may pinch out in the next ten feet, or it may be worth a 
million dollars. Nobody can tell, of course; but on a 
chance like that, a bunch of desperate men wouldn’t stop 
a minute at wiping the three of us out to get hold of it. 
And I’m not so sure they couldn’t do it and get away 
with it. We haven’t seen another living soul between 
the two ranges all summer—except my old Daddy Long- 
beard away over yonder under Mule-Ear Pass—and if 
our folks should turn out search parties, they might look 
for a year without getting any trace of us.” 

Larry was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Does 
that mean that you think we ought to back-track while 
we can, Dick?” 

“Not a bit of it!” was the stout-hearted rejoinder. “At 
least, not for me. How about you, Purdy?” 

Once again the small one surprised his two camp- 
mates. 

“I was just going to say that if you two want to hike 
out and bring help, I’ll stay and do my best to hold on 
until you can get back.” 


i88 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“That settles it,’’ said Larry briefly. “We all stay. 
Now you two turn in and grab off your forty winks. I’m 
batter up for the first watch.” 

Like the night before, this one passed quietly. During 
Larry’s watch the heavens were clear almost up to mid¬ 
night, but when he called Purdick the stars were begin¬ 
ning to disappear and there was a muttering of thunder 
in the air. The rain came later and continued in gusty 
showers until well on toward morning; and at an early 
hour, when Purdick came back from watering the burros 
in the inner recesses of the cave, he brought news. 

“The creek is away high,” he reported; “twice the 
quantity of water coming down that there was yester¬ 
day. You can hear it fighting its way through those 
underground channels ever so far back.” 

“It’s the run-off from the rain,” Larry offered, and let¬ 
ting it go at that, he asked Dick if anything had shown 
up during his watch. 

“Little something,” said Dick. “They have moved off 
somewhere—the hold-ups. A few minutes after dawn 
I saw something stirring down by their camp and I got 
the field-glass. Two of them were crossing the gulch to 
climb the mountain. They were leading a burro, but 
there didn’t seem to be anything on the pack saddle but 
a couple of picks and shovels.” 

“Umph! I wonder what that means ?” Larry grunted. 
But as there was no answer that any of them could think 
of, this incident, like that of the rising water in the cave 
torrent, had to be left unexplained. 

This day, as they all agreed after it was over and they 
were eating supper at the cave’s mouth, was one that de¬ 
served to be marked with a red letter. There had been 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


189 


no interruptions whatever^: not the least sign of their 
late harriers. Hour after hour the watch had been scru¬ 
pulously maintained at the cave entrance, but for anything 
that could be seen or heard, they might have supposed 
themselves to be the only human beings in all the upheaved 
world of mountains and valleys. 

Then, too, the work had gone splendidly in the tunnel. 
They had fired two rounds of blasts, carrying the heading 
in several feet farther, and the vein still showed no signs 
of ‘'pinching out.’’ And the ore continued to look as 
good as it had at first. 

Having put in a hard day’s work, they made early 
preparations for turning in, and by eight o’clock Purdick, 
who had the first watch, was sitting at his post and listen¬ 
ing to the deep breathing of his two companions who 
were already asleep. It was not until some little time 
after he had settled himself to his watch that he missed 
the gurgling murmur of the imprisoned torrent, which 
they had been hearing off and on all day; and when he 
did miss it, it suddenly occurred to him that they had all 
been too tired to remember to lead the burros back into 
the cave for their evening watering. 

Keeping this in mind to the end of his watch, he spoke 
of it when he roused Dick at midnight. Dick offered to 
take the burros back, but Purdick said no; that it was 
as much his oversight as anybody’s, and he would do it. 
He was back again in a very short time, and, as once 
before, he brought news. 

‘T don’t know what’s happened,” he said to Dick, 
speaking softly so as not to disturb Larry, “but the 
creek’s gone dry—dry as a bone. Nothing left but a few 
pools in the hollows, and the jacks drank them dry.” 


190 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“That’s queer,” said Dick. “What do you suppose 
made it do that?” 

“I can’t begin to imagine. The only thing I could 
think of was that maybe the rain flood had made the 
creek find another underground channel somewhere.” 

“That’s bad,” Dick commented. “Without water we 
can’t last any time at all. But we can’t do anything 
about it until morning. You turn in and get your 
snooze.” 

For a sentry seat at the cave mouth they had placed a 
flat rock, and, padding the seat with his blankets, Dick 
settled himself for his watch, with his feet tucked up 
under him and his rifle lying across his lap. It was some 
little time after Purdick’s regular breathing was threat¬ 
ening to develop into a snore that Dick heard a curious 
sound like the ticking of a clock. At first he thought it 
was an insect, the bug commonly known as the “death 
watch.” Yet it didn’t seem just like that, either. “Sounds 
more like water dripping from a leaky faucet,” he mut¬ 
tered to himself; and just then the two sleepers lying a 
few feet away on their sand bed began to stir uneasily, 
and Larry sat up to say, “Here—what’s the matter? 
This sand’s all wet!” 

The startled exclamation woke Purdick and he began 
to struggle out of his blanket. “Pity’s sake!” he 
grumbled. “Is it raining away back in this far?” And 
then explosively: “Say, fellows—Dick! Larry! the water’s 
an inch deep all over this place!” 

Dick, the only one of the three who was fully awake 
and alert, was the first to take the real alarm. 

“The creek’s doing something to us!” he cried out. 
“Don’t you hear that roar? It’s a flood! And it’s com- 


FINDERS KEEPERS 


191 

ing this way! Run for it!” Then remembering sud¬ 
denly that, with the door-yard ledge gone, flight out of 
the cave in the darkness could mean nothing but a neck¬ 
breaking plunge into the gulch below: '‘The tunnel head¬ 
ing—that’s the highest place there is! Climb for itl” 


CHAPTER XII 


NO SURRENDER! 

T he flood in the cave, already three or four inches 
deep on the floor and pouring out of the entrance 
in a splashing cataract when the three boys made a mad 
scramble for the mine tunnel, rose swiftly to a roaring, 
bellowing torrent as they stumbled in black darkness up 
the inclined drift and crowded themselves into the highest 
part of the heading. 

How long the imminent threat of death, either by 
drowning or stifling, lasted they could never tell, though 
minutes can easily figure as hours under such terrifying 
conditions. But one thing they were made quickly to 
realize, and that was that the upward pitch of the tunnel 
was all that was saving them from being drowned, like 
rats in a trap. A sudden, half-suffocating increase in the 
air pressure, making their ears ring and their hearts pound 
like laboring pumps, told them that the water had risen 
above the mouth of the tunnel in the main cave and was 
compressing the pocketed air. And it was the subsidence 
of this pressure that first gave them assurance that the 
worst was over—that the fury was expending itself. 

Dick was the first to speak, and his teeth were chat¬ 
tering. 

‘They’ve g-got us this time!” he stammered. “Th-this 

is what they went up the mountain for yesterday morn- 

192 


NO SURRENDER! 


193 


ing with the picks and shovels. They came down into 
the cave and stopped the creek off behind that fallen 
roof and let the water back up. They knew that when 
it got head enough it would push that loose stuff out 
and come down here and drown us!’^ 

‘T guess you’ve sized it up about right,” Larry agreed, 
trying to wring some of the water out of his dripping 
clothes. Then: ‘^How about you, Purdy? Are you 
still alive and kicking?” 

‘^As much of me as hasn’t been soaked out and washed 
away—yes. But let’s get out of this wet hole.” 

‘^When we do, it will only be to get into a wetter one,” 
said Dick, shivering in his wet clothes. 

Groping their way down the short tunnel in darkness 
that seemed as though it were thick enough to be felt, 
they reached the main cavern. 

‘^Matches!” said Larry. “Have you any dry ones, 
Dick—or you, Purdy? Mine are all soaked.” 

But both Purdick and Dick found that their pocket 
match safes had leaked, also. 

“No light, then,” Larry said. “That’s mighty bad. 
But I guess we can feel around and find out what this 
Noah’s Ark flood has done to us.” 

What the flood had done seemed to be an appalling 
sufliciency. Groping about, they were unable to And any 
trace of their camping outfit. The cave corridor was 
stripped bare of everything, as nearly as they could de¬ 
termine : packs, blankets, field-testing outfit, cooking uten¬ 
sils, provisions—all were gone. And to make it com¬ 
plete, the burros were missing. 

“They’d go, of course,” said Dick gloomily, after 
they had groped over every foot of the cave floor and 


194 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


had come together at the entrance. suppose they’re 
drowned, but if they weren’t, they’d be killed in the fall 
from here to the gulch. Seems to me we’re about at 
the end of things.” 

Little Purdick’s laugh was a mere cackle, but it was 
no reflection upon the amount of nerve he had left. 

'T’m glad you saved your rifle, Dick.” In the excite¬ 
ment of the rush for the mine tunnel, Dick had held on 
to his gun simply because it hadn’t occurred to him to 
drop it. ^‘When it’s light enough to see, those fellows 
will probably come climbing up here to take possession. 
If you’ll let me handle the gun. I’ll promise you that not 
all of them will get here with whole skins.” 

‘T guess I’m with you,” said Dick, with a little shiver. 
Some way, in spite of all that had happened hitherto, 
the fight with the mine jumpers had failed to impress any 
of them as a thing which might suddenly develop into a 
life-and-death struggle. But now they seemed to be face 
to face with the last extremity. Without food or fire, 
with practically nothing left but the clothes they stood in, 
and Dick’s rifle and belt of cartridges, they were, in 
effect, at the mercy of the three men who had been dog¬ 
ging them all summer. Even if they had been free to 
go unmolested, they knew they couldn’t reach the rail¬ 
road without enduring all the hardships of a long march 
without food. 

While they sat at the cave mouth, waiting for the 
dawn, it is safe to say that all three of them took the 
long jump which lies between more or less carefree boy¬ 
hood and responsible manhood. It was Larry Donovan 
who said, at the end of a protracted interval of silence: 

‘T’ve been thinking, fellows. I guess we’ve come to 


NO SURRENDER! 


195 


where the road forks. We’re in the hole just about as 
bad as we can be, and I don’t believe anybody would 
blame us if we should turn tail and run for it. I guess 
that’s about what I’d have done a year ago—or maybe 
a week ago. But, somehow, I can’t seem to kick myself 
around to doing it now.” 

‘^Run away?” Purdick broke in. ‘‘Fat chance we’ve 
got to run—with those fellows probably laying for us in 
the woods down there. I’m thinking we wouldn’t get 
very far. They can’t afford to let us get away alive 
now.” 

“Hold on,” said Larry. “You’re forgetting that the 
flood has probably cleaned the cave out above us—washed 
away that fallen-roof stuff. I suppose we can go out the 
way we came in. And if we should start right now, 
we’d stand a fair chance of getting off. No doubt those 
fellows are confidently expecting to find our bodies in 
the flood wreck in the gulch when it comes light enough 
to see; and if they don’t find them, they’ll think we’re 
buried under the wash somewhere.” 

“Do you want to go, Larry?” Dick asked. 

“No,” came the prompt reply. “As I’ve said, a year 
ago, or a week ago, perhaps, I guess maybe you would 
have had to tie me with a rope to hold me here with 
things as they are now. And with a break-away per¬ 
fectly easy. But it seems as if I’d got about ten years 
older in the last hour or so.” 

“Here, too,” said Dick. “I can’t quite see myself 
sneaking out by the back door.” 

“Just the same, it’s only right and fair to weigh all the 
chances,” Larry put in soberly. “Every hour we stay 
here means just that much less strength to make a get- 


JHE GOLDEN SPIDER 


196 

away up through the cave and over the mountain to Na- 
trolia. And if we don’t mean to make a get-away— 
well, in a couple of days at the longest—saying we can 
stand these robbers off for that long—we’ll be starving.” 

know,” Dick admitted. ‘'But I’m going to stay. 
And when I say that, I’m not thinking of the money 
there may be in this gold vein we’ve been digging in, and 
I don’t believe either of you are. It’s a bigger question 
than that, now, I guess.” 

“You’ve got it right, Dick,” said little Purdick. “We’re 
not fighting for our pockets; we’re fighting to keep a 
bunch of thieves and murderers from taking what doesn’t 
belong to them. I say. No Surrender.’’ 

“That’s the word,” Dick agreed, and as he spoke he 
passed the rifle and cartridge belt over to the best marks¬ 
man. 

While they were talking, the sky had begun to lighten 
in the east with the promise of another cloudless summer 
day. As the stars were extinguished one by one and 
the growing dawn light crept down into the valleys and 
gulches, they were able to see what the dam-bursting 
flood had done. The broad swath mowed down through 
the forest by the avalanche boulder two days earlier had 
formed a path for the flood, and the cataracting water 
had swept it clean of everything movable. 

Far down the slope from the cliff’s foot they saw one 
of the burros grazing peacefully and quite as if nothing 
had happened to it. But the other was lying on its side 
in the path of the flood, and the field-glass showed them 
that it had a broken leg and couldn’t get up. 

“Poor old Fishbait!” said Dick mournfully. “If we 
could only get to him and put him out of his misery!” 


NO SURRENDER! 


197 


Then he refocused the glass and searched carefully for 
some signs of the camp outfit. There was nothing to be 
seen. “I guess it’s all gone on into the gulch creek and 
been washed away,” he said. 

Purdick got up and stretched himself. The cold soak¬ 
ing, with no chance to dry out, had left him stiff and 
numb, and he took a turn around in the cave to limber 
up. When he came back to the crevice mouth, it was 
to say: ‘^Just thought I’d take a squint around to see 
if any of the eatables had been overlooked by the flood. 
They’re all gone; everything’s gone: wood-pile, green- 
grass hay, and even the pile of ore we had sorted out.” 

Larry took up a hole in his belt. ‘^That’s breakfast,” 
he said, with a sort of grim attempt to make a joke of it. 
Then: *Xet’s get back inside—so as to leave them guess¬ 
ing as long as we can.” 

They had hardly withdrawn from the lip of the en¬ 
trance before one of the three miscreants came in sight. 
It was the cripple, and he was swinging along toward 
the lower end of the avalanche path. When he reached 
it he began poking around in the debris with his crutch. 

‘^Humph!” Larry grunted, ‘booking for our dead 
bodies, I suppose.” 

Little Purdick’s pale blue eyes were glowing. 

^‘Shall I try for it?” he whispered. believe I could 
get him, even at this distance.” 

'^No, no!” Larry cut in hastily. ^^They’re cold-blooded 
murderers, all right, but we mustn’t be. When they come 
after us it will be different.” 

While the cripple was poking around with his crutch 
his two accomplices came up. One of them—not the 
black-whiskered one who had been scared off by Pur- 


198 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


dick’s dynamite bomb, but the other—walked over to 
where the disabled burro was lying, and, after a momen¬ 
tary inspection of the poor beast, drew his pistol and shot 
it. Then he walked out to where the other one was 
grazing, picked up the trailing halter, and led the little 
animal back into the woods. 

Shortly afterward, this third man joined the other two 
who were searching the flood wreck. Dick, watching 
them through the field-glass, saw them turn up a pair of 
blankets, a saucepan, the aluminum camp kettle, and one 
of the lost rifles. 

Purdick fingered the lock of his gun. ”1 hope they 
won’t keep us waiting too long,” he said softly. 

“They won’t,” Dick returned, keeping the three in the 
field of the glass. “The big one has quit digging and he’s 
looking up here. Now he’s getting his gun. . . Then, 
suddenly: “Duck—both of you!” 

The warning didn’t come an instant too soon. On the 
heels of it a rifle barked in the gulch, and a bullet sang 
through the crevice opening to spatter itself on the roof 
over their heads. 

“That’s a try-out,” said Larry. “They’re puzzled be¬ 
cause they can’t find our bodies, and they think maybe a 
shot or two will make us show up if we’re still here. 
Don’t shoot, Purdy”—to the small one who was flat on 
his face and was trying to get a rest over the cliff lip. 
“Let’s wait until we have to.” 

The waiting proved to be a weary business for three 
fellows who were both wet and hungry, and had little 
prospect of relieving either discomfort short of defeating 
the three depredators and possibly forcing them to re- 


NO SURRENDER! 


199 


place, out of their own stores, what they had destroyed; 
a result to which not even Dick, the most imaginative of 
the three, could look forward with any hope of its accom¬ 
plishment. At the best, they could only hope to keep the 
spoilers at bay for a time; and they all knew that the 
time wouldn’t be very long if they had to go without 
food. 

After the trial shot which brought no reply from the 
high-lying crevice, two of the men in the gulch resumed 
their search in the flood wreckage, while the third, the 
black-bearded one, went off down stream. It was a full 
hour after sunrise—and the sun, shining fairly into the 
eastward-facing crevice, was doing something to relieve 
the chill of the three sodden watchers—when Blackbeard 
reappeared, leading the burro laden with tools and camp 
dunnage. 

^^Now we get it,” said Dick. “They’re coming up to 
take possession. I wonder how they’ll work it. They 
can’t make that burro climb up here. It’s too steep.” 

But the three men seemed to know what they were 
about. First they drove the laden pack animal as far up 
the avalanche path as it could go, flogging it upward 
until the poor beast was slipping and falling at every 
other step. This brought them within easy range, and 
in a hasty consultation carried on in whispers, the three 
defenders of the Golden Spider decided that they dare 
not wait any longer. As matters stood, Purdick might 
have marked them down and either killed or crippled all 
three before they could reach cover, but they wouldn’t 
take that much of an advantage even of men who were 
no better than midnight assassins. 


200 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“Hi!—you fellows down there!” Dick shouted. “Keep 
your distance or we’ll fire on you!” 

The reply to this sportsmanlike warning came so 
quickly that it seemed as if it must have been planned 
beforehand. Instantly the cripple dodged behind the 
trembling burro, and using it for a breastwork and its 
pack for a rest, opened fire with a repeating rifle, sending 
shot after shot hurtling up into the crevice mouth, while 
his two companions, guns in hand, started to climb 
straight up the slope under cover of this bombardment. 
Owing to the high angle at which the crippled robber 
had to shoot, the defenders of the mine were still safe 
so long as they did not get within the line of fire, and by 
lying flat on the crevice floor they could see without being 
seen. 

Little Purdick’s face was white and drawn, but his 
hands did not tremble when he took careful aim at the 
leading one of the two scrambling climbers. “Don’t kill 
him if you can help it,” Larry cautioned, and as he said 
it, the small-calibre rifle spoke. For an instant it seemed 
as if Purdick had missed. Then the leading man—it 
was the black-whiskered one—stooped to clasp his right 
leg just above the knee, wavered for a second, and ended 
by tumbling backward upon his follower, with the result 
that both rolled together to the bottom of the slope, 
knocking the burro and the cripple down as they went. 

Larry clapped the small marksman on the back. 

“Good work! Bully good work!” he cried. “If you’d 
had a cannon you couldn’t have done any better!” 

Dick had the glass to his eyes again. “They’re over¬ 
hauling the shot one and tying his leg up,” he reported. 
“Now the cripple—the natural one—is shaking his fist 



Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by 
tumbling backward upon his follower. 














NO SURRENDER! 


201 


at us. ril bet that little surprise party’ll cool ’em off 
some!” 

It did, so far as any further attempt to take the mine 
by direct assault went. As soon as the wounded man 
could get upon his feet and limp along, the three dodged 
in among the gulch trees, towing the laden burro, and 
were lost to sight. 

After that there was another unnerving wait. Higher 
and higher rose the sun, and still there were no further 
signs of the enemy. After what seemed like an age, 
Dick said: ‘‘Do you suppose they’ve given up ?” 

“No chance of it,” Larry contended. “They’ve gone 
too far. They know that if they let us get away now 
there’ll be something worse than a charge of mine-jump¬ 
ing to face. They’ve tried to murder us.” 

“Gee, gosh!” Dick complained. “I wish they’d hurry 
up before I get any hungrier!” 

As the time dragged on, there seemed to be little chance 
of the wish being fulfilled. At last Dick jumped up, de¬ 
claring that he’d fly all to pieces if he didn’t stir around 
a bit. 

“Stir all you want to,” said Purdick. “Larry and I 
will keep watch.” 

Dick tramped back and forth in the cavern for a few 
minutes until he got his stiffened muscles limbered up, 
and then disappeared in the backward reaches of the 
crevice. When he returned he was breathing hard as if 
he had been running. 

“What is it?” Purdick asked. 

“A knock-out,” said Dick shortly. “There isn’t any 
back door.” 


202 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


“What do you mean?” It was Larry who wanted to 
know. 

“I’ve been back in the cave. I noticed that the warm 
wind we felt sucking through the first morning when we 
came in was blowing again. You don’t feel it much 
here at the entrance, but farther down it draws like a 
chimney. While I was about it, I thought I would keep 
on and see if we really had a back door open again, as 
the wind seemed to show. We haven’t. Those fellows 
must have dragged in a whole forest when they built 
that flooding dam yesterday. Most of the tree wreckage 
was pushed on down with the flood to one of the big 
chambers, and that is so chock full of it that a fice-dog 
couldn’t crawl through, much less a man.” 

“But you say the wind blows through,” Purdick put in. 

“Oh, yes; it’s open enough for that. But even if we 
had the axe we couldn’t hack our way through in less 
than half a day.” 

“All right,” said Larry, setting his jaw grimly. “That 
means fight or die. I guess we’re . . . What’s that 
noise: 

They all held their breath and listened. There was no 
mistaking the sounds that came floating to them on the 
indrawing draft of air. They were the measured blows 
of an axe and they seemed to come from somewhere up 
above the crevice entrance. 

“They’re up over us somewhere,” Purdick said. “It 
sounds as if they’re cutting a tree down.” 

Momentarily expecting another attack, they gathered 
at the cave mouth and waited, little Purdick with his rifle 
at the “ready.” What shape the attack would take they 
couldn’t remotely guess. The step-like cliff into the face 


NO SURRENDER! 


203 


of which the crevice burrowed was not very high, and 
on the next step above it there were trees growing; so 
much they had noted on the first morning of their occu¬ 
pancy when they had gone into the gulch for the forage 
and the wood. But there was every reason to believe 
that these trees had all been smashed and carried down 
into the gulch by the dynamited avalanche, as Dick pointed 
out. 

^‘Not all of them,” Purdick objected. ‘‘That chopping 
is right above us, and it can’t be farther away than that 
upper ledge.” 

In a very few minutes all further argument on that 
score had its answer in the crackling sounds made by a 
tree in its fall. A dark shadow swept down diagonally 
from above, and the next moment the cave’s mouth was 
blocked by a great fir standing top downward and appar¬ 
ently suspended upside down from the ledge above by the 
still unsevered remains of the chopped trunk. 

“Huh!” said Larry. “Now what does that mean? 
They can’t use that tree for a ladder.” 

Whatever it might mean, it was instantly made plain 
that they were not to be given a chance to investigate. 
Somewhere down in the gulch a rifle cracked and a bullet 
tore its way through the dense foliage of the hanging 
tree. Reckless of his own safety, Purdick tried to part 
the thick branches so that he could see and poke his gun 
through for a reply, but the thick screen was impene¬ 
trable. 

Courageously persistent, the small one was still trying 
to force his way through the thickset branches when some¬ 
thing that seemed to take the shape of a huge ball of fire 
came down from above, and a choking gust of resinous 


204 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


smoke drove Purdick back gasping. The man on the 
ledge above had lowered a blazing torch of some kind, 
and the hanging tree was afire. 

“WeTe done for!” Dick gasped, fighting for breath in 
the stifling smoke cloud that was instantly drawn into 
the crevice by the chimneying draft, and he was starting 
to feel his way toward the inner depths when Larry 
grabbed him and shoved him forcibly toward the gold 
vein opening. 

‘'The mine tunnel!” he choked. “There is no draft in 
there! Hurry, for pity’s sake! Where are you, Purdy?” 

The great tree was roaring like a fiery furnace before 
they had stumbled blindly to the small tunnel entrance, 
and tongues of flame were licking far into the crevice as 
if the heat were increasing the natural draft a hundred 
fold. Panting, blinded and choking, they crowded into the 
farther end of the blasted-out pocket which had been 
their refuge from the flood, and though the smoke was 
there before them, the air was still breathable. 

As everybody who has ever seen a forest fire knows, 
the mountain conifers burn as rapidly as if their leaves 
were made of celluloid. While the three crowding bur- 
rowers were still gasping for breath, the flame roar went 
out, but the dense smoke cloud continued to pour into 
the cavern. 

Into the silence that followed the expiring flame blast 
came a sharp staccato of rifle shots, yells of rage or dis¬ 
may, they couldn’t tell which, and then more rifle crashes. 
After these there was another interval of silence, which 
was shortly broken by a recurrence of the chopping axe 
blows from above. After a few of the dull-sounding axe 
blows the smoking tree-torch let go and rolled down into 


NO SURRENDER! 


205 


the gulch; the welcome sunlight began to penetrate the 
smoky interior of the cave, and a grateful gush of fresh 
air came to make life a little better worth living. 

wonder what’s happened,” said Dick hoarsely. And 
then: ^Tm crying so hard I can’t see.” 

They were all three weeping copiously, for that matter; 
smoke tears they were, but none the less blinding for all 
that. Rubbing their eyes, they stumbled down into the 
cavern, little Purdick with his gun up and ready to fire. 
At the mouth of the mine tunnel they were met, not by 
a trio of murderers ready to shoot them down, as they 
fully expected, but by an apparition—a tall old man, 
white-haired and with a snowy beard reaching almost to 
his waist. 

‘‘Daddy Longbeard!” Dick cried out, dashing the tears 
from his eyes. “Where, for goodness’ sake, did you 
come from?” 

“Huh!” grunted the old man. “Jes’ now I’ve come 
from havin’ a li’l’ round-up with them cusses that was 
tryin’ to burn ye out. Ain’t scorched none, are ye?” 

“We’re all alive yet, but that’s about all you can say 
for us,” Dick bubbled. “But what has become of the 
hold-ups? And how did you happen to get here just in 
the very nick of time?” 

It all came out in the old man’s chopped sentences. 
Three or four days earlier, an outgoing prospector had 
told him that “Twisty” Atkins, Tom Dowling and Bart 
Jennison, three desperate men who had all served prison 
sentences for various crimes, were camping on the trail 
of three young fellows whom the gossiping prospector 
had called “vacationers.” 

“I knowed, right off, what that meant,” the old man 


2o6 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


went on, *^and I made Bill Jenkins—he was the feller 
that was tellin’ me all this—carry a telegrapht message 
over to Nophi for Mr. Billy Starbuck. I writ in that 
telegrapht that his boys was liken to get into trouble over 
here, and that he’d better get him a posse and come on 
in. Then, after I’d waited a day ’r so, and he didn’t 
come, I got sort o’ nervous, and lit out myself.” 

“But how did you know where to find us?” Larry 
asked. 

The old miner’s grin showed his broken teeth. 

“I allowed you’d be somewhere inside o’ that circle 
I’d marked out on the map I gin ye. And this mornin’, 
as I was cookin’ breakfas’, I heerd the shootin’.” 

“But what has become of the hold-ups ?” Purdick said, 
repeating Dick’s question. 

“I’ve got two of ’em—Twisty’ and Jennison—down 
yonder in the gulch, laid out so’t they’ll have to be carried 
mule-back to wherever they’re a-goin’. Dowling was 
up here on the bench overhead, and he took out when I 
opened up on him. But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars 
that he’s carryin’ a li’l’ chunk o’ my lead with him, wher¬ 
ever he’s at.” 

All this talk had been carried on at the mouth of the 
cave, and as yet nothing had been said about the Golden 
Spider. But now Dick told their old rescuer that they 
had found James Brock’s wonderful mine; told him also 
how they had happened to find it, and, briefly, what the 
hold-ups had been doing to them since they had found it. 

“You didn’t need to tell me that,” the old man was 
beginning; but just as he got that far, there came a shout 
and a rifle shot from the gulch, and they all looked out 


NO SURRENDER! 


207 


to see a bunch of mounted men riding out upon the tail¬ 
ings of the flood wash. “There’s yer uncle and his 
posse,” said the grim old prospector whom Dick had 
made rich by a simple little blowpipe test. “They must 
’a’ been follerin’ right along behind me. I blazed my 
trail so they wouldn’t have no trouble tellin’ which-a-way 
to come. Reckon we’d better be climbin’ down. You 
boys’ve gone a long time a-waitin’ for yer breakfast.” 

An hour later, when the three defenders of the Golden 
Spider had put away a meal big enough to fill up all the 
crevices opened by their missed breakfast, and had told 
Mr. William Starbuck in detail all that had happened to 
them in their wonderful summer, the shrewd-eyed ex¬ 
cattleman put his arm over Dick’s shoulder and said: 

“Well, you’ve had good times, and some pretty tough 
times, but I guess you’ve all grown a good bit since 
you left Brewster in June. You all look it, anyway. And 
I want to congratulate the three of you on the find you’ve 
made, and upon the way you held on and defended it 
after you’d got it. Not many fellows of your age and 
experience would have stood up to those three rascals as 
you did, especially after they gave you a chance to duck 
and run. 

“Now about your summer’s work; that is satisfactory, 
too. Even if only one of the rare-metal prospects you 
have staked out proves to be worth working, you will 
have earned your grub-stake many times over. As for 
this gold mine up yonder in the cliff, you may leave that 
to us. We’ll see to it that it is properly guarded, and 
recorded in your names as discoverers, and your father 
and I, Dick, will undertake to find the capital for work- 


2o8 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


ing it, the money to be paid back out of the earnings of 
the mine when it gets to be a going proposition. But 
there is one thing about that: don’t get your ideas too 
high up. Old Uncle Jimmie Brock’s Golden Spider may 
prove to be a bonanza and make all three of you rich; 
and, on the other hand, it may be only a pocket deposit 
that will merely pay back the development capital. Keep 
that in mind and don’t spend your money until you get it.” 

‘‘Then you meant what you said—about giving the 
mine to us?” Dick asked. 

“Certainly I did. A bargain is a bargain. And it’s 
your discovery as much as any other lode would be. I 
only hope it won’t spoil you if it turns out to be a bo¬ 
nanza.” 

Larry looked at Purdick, and little Purdick handed the 
look back. And it was Purdick who made answer. 

“Larry and Dick will tell you, Mr. Starbuck, that I 
was mighty nearly an anarchist when they brought me 
out here last June,” he said steadily. “I used to believe 
there weren’t any good rich people in the world. I’m 
wondering what will happen to me if it should turn out 
that I’ve got to get over on the other side of the fence.” 

“Nothing bad will happen to you. I’m sure,” was the 
kindly reply. “Money isn’t everything; it isn’t anything 
compared with what’s inside of the man who has it—or 
hasn’t it. If you’ve had hard times, you’ll be better able 
to feel for and to help other fellows who are having hard 
times. You’ll know what it means to them, better than 
either Dick or Larry, here. 

“Now about your plans. You have only a few days 
left before you will have to start back to college. You’ve 



NO SURRENDER! 


209 


t 


finished your job out here, so you may as well start for 
Natrolia at once. We’ll outfit you for the one night’s 
camp you’ll have to make and you can take the burro 
you have left to carry your provisions. I don’t want to 
hurry you off, but the folks in Brewster will be mighty 
anxious until they hear from you. If you start now, 

. you can make the top of the range by nightfall.” 

• • • • • ♦ 

The sun was sinking to its setting in a far-distant west¬ 
ern wilderness when three young fellows who had been 
tramping steadily all afternoon up a steep mountain trail 
came out upon the summit of the range and stopped to 
look back upon another wilderness, with the buttes and 
gulches, valleys and rugged upheavals of which they had 
become affectionately familiar during the long summer 
weeks. 

‘Uee!” said the smallest of the three. ‘‘Has it all been 
real? Or have we only been dreaming it? It’s—it’s 
getting away from me already!” 

The other two laughed, and the one of the two whose 
tongue was always the readiest said: “Good land, 
Purdy! if it’s fading out on you now, what will it be two 
weeks from now, when we’re back at the grind in Old 
Sheddon? It’s real enough to me.” 

For a long minute the smallest one stood looking 
steadfastly into the depths from which they had lately 
ascended; looked so long and steadily that his eyes filled 
and he had to wink them rapidly to be able to see at all. 

“Say, fellows—I want always to remember that bully 
old mountain wilderness just as we’re seeing it now,” he 
said in low tones; “it, and the good times we’ve had this 


210 


THE GOLDEN SPIDER 


summer, and the way we got tangled up in The Web of 
the Golden Spider. Don’t you?” 

‘‘Here, too,” said Dick Maxwell softly. 

And then they turned away reluctantly to tramp down 
the descending trail in the eye of the glowing sunset. 


THE END 


• i 






i 









































































